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Posted by bumbledraven 13 hours ago

I am building a cloud(crawshaw.io)
781 points | 403 commentspage 4
gregdelhon 8 hours ago|
You should do it in Europe, so much demand for European clouds and very weak offerings.
kelvinjps10 3 hours ago||
hezner, OVH? in terms of price and just having a vps that works european clouds are better than the american ones, for me is easier to understand a vps that is just *Linux* that whatever AWS or GCP are doing.
hkpack 5 hours ago||
US company doing cloud in Europe changes nothing because of the CLOUD Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
999900000999 5 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 5 hours ago|
Convex's open source version is OK as long as you don't expect huge load.
PunchyHamster 9 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

ianpurton 12 hours ago||
I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?
szszrk 10 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 12 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.
bedstefar 10 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 9 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 8 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

hbhhh 4 hours ago||
HeavyBit is absolutely gross. I've heard lots of horrible things about them from multiple founders.

One of my friends was told to come to a sex party that was all male and he is straight. It soured his relationship with the firm so much he ended up winding down the business.

furyofantares 3 hours ago||
Does that any anything to do with exe.dev?
iqihs 3 hours ago||
o.O
dzonga 4 hours ago||
finally a cloud 'vendor' that understands that modern computers are fast.

if we go back to the principle that modern computers are really fast, SSDs are crazy fast

and we remove the extra cruft of abstractions - software will be easier to develop - and we wouldn't have people shilling 'agents' as a way for faster development.

ultimately the bottleneck is our own thinking.

simple primitives, simpler thinking.

k9294 11 hours ago||
That's really cool!

One thing I'm confused with is how to create a shared resources like e.g. a redis server and connect to it from other vms? It looks now quite cumbersome to setup tailscale or connect via ssh between VMS. Also what about egress? My guess is that all traffic billed at 0.07$ per GB. It looks like this cloud is made to run statefull agents and personal isolated projects and distributed systems or horizontal scaling isn't a good fit for it?

Also I'm curious why not railway like billing per resource utilization pricing model? It’s very convenient and I would argue is made for agents era.

I did setup for my friends and family a railway project that spawns a vm with disk (statefull service) via a tg bot and runs an openclaw like agent - it costs me something like 2$ to run 9 vms like this.

pjc50 12 hours ago||
The "one price" is oddly small for a cloud company. I'm sure it's nice and fast but the $20/mo seems smaller than some companies' free tiers, especially for disk.

The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.

imafish 11 hours ago|
Don’t worry - that will certainly change in the future if they have any kind of success :)
satnhak 7 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 6 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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