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Posted by bumbledraven 11 hours ago

I am building a cloud(crawshaw.io)
667 points | 335 commentspage 3
999900000999 3 hours ago|
I really want an open source version of Firebase with feature parity.

I don’t care about how the backend works. Superbase requires magical luck to self host.

A lot of cloud providers have very generous free tiers to hook you and then the moment things take off , it’s a small fortune to keep the servers on.

xixixao 3 hours ago|
Convex's open source version is OK as long as you don't expect huge load.
sroussey 10 hours ago||
> The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center.

Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.

ac29 4 hours ago|
It was a weird point to make in the post given that exe.dev charges $0.07/GB for transfer. That's arguably worse than the major clouds, who charge about the same for egress but give you free ingress.
crawshaw 4 hours ago||
Author here.

I need to fix our transfer pricing. (In fact I'm going to go look at it now.) I set that number when we launched in December, and we were still considering building on top of AWS, so we put a conservative limit based on what wouldn't break the bank on AWS. Now that we are doing our own thing, we can be far more reasonable.

jFriedensreich 3 hours ago||
I have trouble seeing how this is different to linode, if i invest time in a new VM api, this has to work for cloud or my own machines transparently. Lastly as much as i share the disappointment in k8s promise, this seems a bit too simple, there is a reason homelabs mostly standardised on compose files.
boesboes 8 hours ago||
I have mixed feelings about this concept, I agree that the way clouds work now is far from great and stronger abstractions are possible. But this article offers nothing of the sort, it just handwaves 'we solve some problem and that saves you tokens'???

Checking the current offering, it's just prepaid cloud-capacity with rather low flexibility. It's cheap though, so that is nice I guess. But does this solve anything new? Anything fly.io orso doesn't solve?

What is the new idea here? Or is it just the vibes?

JokerDan 5 hours ago||
I have had an eye on this for a while (found via pi.dev) but I don't really have a solid use case for it, but the idea/concept of is appealing where the price is not. I can buy a £100-150 mini-pc with better hardware to run 24/7 for my own VMs extending my homelab (granted my ISP doesn't put any restrictions on me, I know many others can't say the same).

You can see their base docker image here - https://github.com/boldsoftware/exeuntu

gregdelhon 6 hours ago||
You should do it in Europe, so much demand for European clouds and very weak offerings.
hkpack 3 hours ago|
US company doing cloud in Europe changes nothing because of the CLOUD Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
PunchyHamster 7 hours ago||
The author seems to have no clue what is cloud problem, and what is k8s problem, and is blaming everything on k8s. The whole post reeks of ignorance. I have no love to k8s but he is just flat out putting out false information.

> Finally, clouds have painful APIs. This is where projects like K8S come in, papering over the pain so engineers suffer a bit less from using the cloud.

K8s's main function isn't to paint over existing cloud APIs, that is just necessity when you deploy it in cloud. On normal hardware it's just an orchestration layer, and often just a way to pass config from one app to another in structured format.

> But VMs are hard with Kubernetes because the cloud makes you do it all yourself with lumpy nested virtualization.

Man discovered system designed for containers is good with containers, not VMs. More news at 10

> Disk is hard because back when they were designing K8S Google didn’t really even do usable remote block devices, and even if you can find a common pattern among clouds today to paper over, it will be slow.

Ignorance. k8s have abstractions over a bunch of types of storage, for example using Ceph as backend will just use KVM's Ceph backend, no extra overhead. It also supports "oldschool" protocols used for VM storage like NFS or iSCSI. It might be slow in some cases for cloud if cloud doesn't provide enough control, but that's not k8s fault.

> Networking is hard because if it were easy you would private link in a few systems from a neighboring open DC and drop a zero from your cloud spend.

He mistakes cloud problems with k8s problems(again). All k8s needs is visibility between nodes. There are multiple providers to achieve that, some with zero tunelling, just routing. It's still complex, but no more than "run a routing daemon".

I expect his project to slowly reinvent cloud APIs and copying what k8s and other projects did once he starts hitting problems those solutions solved. And do it worse, because instead of researching of why and why not that person seems to want to throw everything out with learning no lessons.

Do not give him money

bedstefar 8 hours ago||
This looks like an excellent platform for running a "homelab" in the cloud (no, the irony is not lost on me) for lighter stuff like Readeck, Calibre-web, Immich. Maybe even Home Assistant too if we can find a way (Tailscale?) to get the mDNS/multicast traffic tunnelled.
omnimus 7 hours ago|
With pricing 100gb/8usd Immich would be wildly uneconomical. Better to wait for upcoming immich hosting to support the project or use ente.io - those are 1tb/10usd.
bedstefar 6 hours ago||
That's a good tip, thanks. What I meant to say was that there's probably at least a handful of self-hosted services you could run to offset that $20/mo.

Another one could be Bitwarden, although I don't host my own password manager personally. Or netbird. You get the point

ianpurton 10 hours ago||
I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?
szszrk 8 hours ago||
You choose a region. Then you pay for some compute size (vcpu and mem), and then you can create a lot of VMs using those limits. If some VM's don't consume all resources, others can consume it in burst.

VMs have a built-in gateway to cloud providers with a fixed url with no auth. You can top that in via the service itself. No need for your own keys.

So likely a good tool for managing AI agents. And "cloud" is a bit of a stretch, the service is very narrow.

The complete lack of more detailed description of the regions except city name makes it really only suitable for ephemeral/temporary deployments. We don't know what the datacenters are, what redundancy is in place, no backups or anything like that.

saltmate 10 hours ago||
As I understand, a cloud provider where instead of paying for each VM (with a set of resources), you pay for the resources, and can get as many VMs as you can fit on these resources.
satnhak 5 hours ago|
AWS. Months of complex dev work to build using their CDK. Terrible disk speed. Frustrating permissions systems. Tiny deployments that take 30 minutes. Rollbacks that get stuck for hours. What you end up with is about 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM for $1000+ per month. No wonder Bezos could send his wife and Katie Perry on a jolly into space. The world's richest man 1 IOP at a time.

For that money I can get 5 big bare metal boxes on OVH with fast SSDs, put k0s on them, fast deploy with kluctl, cloudflare tunnels for egress. Backups to a cheap S3 bucket somewhere. I'll never look at another cloud provider.

BirAdam 4 hours ago|
If you're using cloudflare tunnels, you don't even need to be on OVH. You could seriously host anywhere, like your own basement.
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