12 ms·

I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)

299 points by pkrumins 16y ago

michael_dorfman 16y ago
That is a very cool idea, Peteris. I wish you the best of luck! A question, though: how do you plan to monetize it? Without a business model, it's a web app, but not really a startup.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  I thought the monetization was pretty obvious. I also mentioned it in the post. We're simply going to take care of your virtual machines (host them and make sure they always work) and give you awesome software to work with them!
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    Sorry, my bad-- I don't know how I missed that paragraph! Doing this as a paid service from day one is definitely the right way to go. Again, good job.
jefffoster 16y ago
Have you seen http://www.spoon.net/ http://www.spoon.net/? It seems very similar to the StackVM idea.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  I hadn't seen spoon.net! Now investigating!
  - nik61 16y ago
    But just another interesting web service that demands my card details before it will tell me how much anything costs! Fundamental mistake? I think so...
- substack 16y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out! Spoon seems to have found a nice niche in hosting up individual applications. StackVM right now is more about the entire operating system and geared towards hackers for the time being, but we may pivot into other areas. There are a lot of potential niches in this domain which is part of the reason why the problem is so exciting!
- ydant 16y ago
  They poorly handle the OS requirements (both in terms of implementation and notification). I had to go into the FAQ to find this: > Spoon currently supports Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 3 and 3.5, and Safari 2, 3, and 4, on the Windows platform. Support for the Chrome and Opera browsers is coming soon! Which isn't even mentioned where you might expect - where they discuss the plug-in. If you go to any individual app in Linux (Chrome, FF3.5) you just get "this browser isn't supported".
  - substack 16y ago
    Wow I had no idea! StackVM is all html and javascript and we've taken great care to make sure it works on all browsers without any silly plugins.
    - blueberry 16y ago
      you might want to rethink about plugins depending on your expected audience. People who are looking for good remote desktop solutions would be OK with installing plugins. I played the game on the front page on spoon.net and there was very little lag, it was a smooth experience. People who use remote desktop would prefer smooth experience over ease of installation.
      - substack 16y ago
        We plan to offer some kind of rdesktop or vnc backend for powerusers, since our software hooks into these on the backend anyways. This is a useful point!
      - SnowLprd 16y ago
        Completely disagree with this idea. If you can avoid browser plugins without major issue, and it seems you have been successful at that so far, by all means continue to do so. Not only will the technorati appreciate not having to install yet another piece of (usually unnecessary) software, but corporate customers will be more inclined to deploy in their environments if it means there won't be another piece of software for them to install and maintain across their entire enterprise.
koevet 16y ago
The use cases are exciting, I see a lot of potential for education purposes. Good luck!
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Thank you!
nailer 16y ago
Nice. I'd suggest demoing Windows XP before the Linux OS - not only is it more widely recognizable but there may be more users who have old desktop XP (or 98, etc) apps that could use your software.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion. Well, can't change this video anymore but I'll note that for future videos we'll be making!
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
ivenkys 16y ago
I can see a few use-cases where this can be quite useful especially if easy to use. To me the more interesting aspect of it is the - Complete open-source , idea-open and source-code open. For a startup looking for funding (applying to YC) , this is new, i wonder how it would gell with the investors.
- substack 16y ago
  Yeah, it is one of the big unknowns we are testing with this startup, but for us it makes a lot of sense. By being open about our technology, we hope to gain eyeballs, traction, and goodwill from fellow hackers who might be our future customers. By being open about our ideas, we expose them to criticism so that we can reform them to be more realistic and to exploit new opportunities that we hadn't considered.
blueberry 16y ago
Looks really impressive, congrats. I don't really see why it is called VM though, did you actually implement an emulator? How does this differ from online remote desktop solutions (say logmein)? Also if you want to reach beyond the geek community you might want to focus on a few of the ideas instead of the many ones that you currently have. For example, making the screencast great or making the demo of an application on a StackVM great. If you don't come up with a particular use case you might need to compete with giants like VMware or XEN.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Hey, thanks. We didn't implement an emulator but since we're bringing virtual machines to the web, we decided to add 'VM' to our title to give an idea that this is related to virtual machines. Addressing your other questions, sure, we won't have like 100 features where we get lost ourselves. We'll have a small set of standard features and we'll have an API that will let developers hack on stackvm and make it do all other wonders. I don't know much about logmein at this point but they are corporate company and we are awesome and enthusiastic hackers.
  - kordless 16y ago
    If it helps with anything you are doing, I wrote a quick and dirty project to launch EC2 instances for people to demo software during a class. http://code.google.com/p/fabulatr/ http://code.google.com/p/fabulatr/
  - mitjak 16y ago
    I think it's actually the name that plaguing you at this point: it suggests that you're going to present another VM or, perhaps, something EC2 like.
ydant 16y ago
I was skeptical from the title. My first thought was "isn't this what EC2, and every other VPS provider does?" I have to admit, your pitch won me over - this looks interesting. On second thought, you did say "web", not "internet". I'm so used to people treating the two as synonymous that I didn't make the distinction myself. So I'd say make that more clear.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Well, for most of the people "web" and "internet" are the same things. I think there was a Google experiment where they asked what is the internet, and people would just say internet explorer, meaning web is their internet.
DrJokepu 16y ago
Very interesting! Assuming that you will have reasonable pricing and a fast connection, I would be very interested in using this service for my own startup.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Hi DrJokepu, I couldn't find your contact information so I am replying here. Can you reach me at peter@catonmat.net? I'd like to know more about how you'd use stackvm at your startup, so that when we launch stackvm we already had a usable product! Peteris
ndimopoulos 16y ago
Very good idea! I liked very much what I saw in the video. I agree with koevet this would be awesome for educational purposes. Keep up the good work!
pasbesoin 16y ago
Wishing you much luck. It's great to see you launching.
msy 16y ago
It's awesome to see a startup developing some genuinely new interesting tech rather than yet another project management or GTD app on $framework. Really neat stuff!
patrickk 16y ago
This is very cool. I could certainly see myself using this. The very best of luck with your YC application. A similar project you may get inspiration from: http://lifehacker.com/5590935/phpvirtualbox-manages-your-virtual-machines-remotely http://lifehacker.com/5590935/phpvirtualbox-manages-your-vir...
bootload 16y ago
"... At the moment StackVM is in its 3rd major iteration already and is almost entirely built on node.js. Since we're doing everything open-source, we've written a bunch of reusable node.js modules: ..." Most significant bit, many thx.
arvinb 16y ago
There's good potential for these kinds of app, especially now in the age of cloud computing.
duck 16y ago
This is one of those things that you would never think of, but once you see it you're blown away. Very cool and promising. Great job Peter.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Thanks!
aquark 16y ago
This looks great! Any comments on how feasible Windows VMs will be to offer from a licensing perspective? Best of luck with this.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  We haven't really looked yet into licensing stuff. We'll do that quite later when we get ready to start offering the service. For now we're just building the stuff up and not thinking too much about anything else.
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    That strikes me as dangerous - if MS Windows licenses then rule out what you're wanting to do you're up the creek without a paddle (perhaps you'll still ahve a spoon to paddle with, same system but only OSS VMs). If the licenses can be worked around then you're better building that I'd have thought.
  - aaronbrethorst 16y ago
    I would recommend worrying about Windows licensing now. I worked for a company doing something quite similar for two years and I remember that Windows licensing is a bit of a sticky spot.
surki 16y ago
That's pretty neat. If you are going to support Windows, how does stackvm compare against "Terminal Services Web Access (TS Web Access)" [1] [1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771908(WS.10).aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771908(WS.10).a...
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Well, right here: "You must install TS Web Access on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008." With stackvm you don't have to install anything, no plugins, not even flash and you don't need a modern web browser. We're making our software work in all the browsers, even as old IE as 5.5.
  - surki 16y ago
    OK, didn't see that one. But technically it should be possible to do that(i.e., pure web rendering through JS) for TS as well. What I meant to ask was - how does it compare using VNC against RDP. Probably you have through and rejected RDP, so was curious to know the technical details. (xrdp for Linux exists as well)
    - pkrumins 16y ago
      To be honest, we haven't looked at RDP yet. We're been building everything on top of VNC. We did not look because we didn't have the necessary libraries written like node-bufferlist (for easy binary protocol parsing) and dnode (for sending stuff around easily). But now that we have, we'll soon look into RDP.
chunkbot 16y ago
The use cases are really interesting; online product demos will be a killer feature, and we wouldn't have to worry about piracy (we're able to monitor the piracy rates of our desktop app, and it's about 25% of our paid subscriptions)...
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Hi chunkbot, Wanted to reach out to you through email but was unable to find any contact information. We'd like to work more closely with you on perfecting the online product demos feature. Would you be interested in testing it out on your website soon? Please contact me at peter@catonmat.net! Peteris
cmurphycode 16y ago
First, I have to say that this looks ambitious. There are some pretty exciting things in the gameplan; I am especially interested in the vmcasts idea. While I have to wonder if they can accomplish all of the ideas they lay out here, given the posts I've seen from catonmat.net before, I think they can do it. From what I can tell, Peteris is not just clever, but very motivated and loves to code and introspect his talents. This is usually a winning combination. I am excited you decided to open everything, but I wonder if you're going to be able to raise the money necessary to fund the infrastructure. Do either of you have a lot of business experience? If you can seize your opportunities well enough, you can probably monetize your idea while letting others do what they will with the code. Looking forward to see how this evolves.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  We don't have any business experience but we hope to gather enough attention that by the time we launch everyone wants a copy of our software already. :)
tomstuart 16y ago
Brilliant. I'm so disappointed you didn't open the XP VM inside XP's Chrome!
- johkra 16y ago
  That's exactly what I was wondering after he opened the terminal inside XP: What happens when you open a VM inside a VM?
  - pkrumins 16y ago
    I tried it out, but forgot to do it in the demo. You get an awesome feedback/recursion effect! I'll try to do a video about it in a few hours and post it here. :D
  - pkrumins 16y ago
    I have recorded the video, it's pretty awesome. Uploading to youtube in a minute!
  - pkrumins 16y ago
    It's live! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y Also posted it to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536011 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536011
barrkel 16y ago
I wouldn't be so positive about open-source everywhere. I'd recommend keeping some amount of the server-side closed source. The risk I see is that competitors can simply use your code and run the cheapest hardware they can find, while you have to run the cheapest hardware you can find and maintain and improve the software. Unless you have a different edge on the hardware side, you have no sustainable competitive advantage. So I'd suggest you stick with the open API, and perhaps have an open reference implementation, but add value in a secret sauce on the server side which competitors can't simply copy.
- nollidge 16y ago
  Surely they've already thought of this.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    And I would expect my comment to elicit their thinking. From the post, it seems a little pollyannaish, paraphrasing: open source for the hackers, charging money from the start for the business, everybody wins, yay! On the other hand, perhaps their thinking on this is part of the secret sauce, and it's being kept secret for good reason.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    > Linode could offer this stack as an in browser way to access lish. Linode already has an in-browser interface to Lish, and I don't think Lish would work over VNC anyway, since it seems to operate on a lower level.
- theBobMcCormick 16y ago
  Open Source could be an advantage for them if they change their license to the AGPLv3. With an AGPLv3 license, any competitors would be required to make their modifications available for download. But as the copyright holder, the OP would not have to release any source he didn't want to, giving him the flexibility to run private, closed source extensions/enhancements if he chooses.
flyosity 16y ago
FWIW I think saying "doing a startup" sounds pretty childish. Why not say that you're starting a company? "Doing a startup" sounds like you're just messing around with a concept, testing the waters. "Starting a company" makes you look more serious, like you know what you're doing. Just my opinion.
- kordless 16y ago
  I think there is a certain sense of excitement and anticipation in the term. This is a new beginning and a start of a new life for these guys. Frankly, I could care less how they reference what they are doing, or whether or not they put .ly on the end of their name! As long as they are doing something relevant and are having a good time doing it, more power to them.
- lkozma 16y ago
  "just messing around with a concept, testing the waters" this might be exactly the best way to start something like this.
- mahmud 16y ago
  I, personally, appreciate the lack of pretension.
theBobMcCormick 16y ago
Have you considered offering a customer self hosted option? It sounds like you could easily position it as a lightweight alternative to Citrix and Windows Terminal Services.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Sure, since the software is opensource, anyone can set it up and use it for self hosted vms.
  - theBobMcCormick 16y ago
    I was thinking some kind of supported version or support agreement. Lots of companies won't run anything internally that doesn't come with some kind of vendor support.
gsk 16y ago
Excellent execution. I'd certainly be interested in the paid service when it comes out. The 100% opensource idea is probably a distraction you can do without at the moment. I want the paid service to be great. I won't care if it is opensource or not.
- pkrumins 16y ago
  The 100% opensource is actually very motivating. We want to create new libs that everyone else can use, then the same people who use it contribute back and fix bugs for us. It's lovely. And we can also reuse our libs later in more projects. Very awesome.
kirvyteo 16y ago
Cool stuff. The first thing I thought about was the latency. One of the problems running VNC or remote desktop over internet is always latency. I tried running VNC to EC2 instances for a test but the experience is terrible. It will be nice to see this run faster.
blueberry 16y ago
Based on the confusion that others and I had, I suggest changing your name and dropping VM from it. It really doesn't convey what you are trying to accomplish. When I first heard it, I thought you were making a VM together with an OS with an eccentric stack allocation algorithm or sth.
- trainwreckin 16y ago
  Personally I think that the chaps should focus on making the product even better instead of branding - the name can obviously change later when they decide to push for market release and by then they probably would be clever enough to seek the wisdom of someone to help them there.
d0m 16y ago
I would use it instead of always have to re-download putty when I'm not on a linux box. For the money part, you might also consider setting up the domain and redirect for a small fee. For instance, my-name.com could be my VMs securised with a password. Also, what is the limit of GB I can put on the VM? Say I want to upload files and mp3s.. is there a limit? May I pay to increase it? Finally, I would like to be able to connect to my VM from other way than web. Say I'm on my linux box with my terminal prompt, it would be nice if I could just ssh to my-name.com and get my VM.. upload/download stuff with scp, and connect to it with FTP. But of course, this would work more with the linux part I suppose :p Anyhow, congrats also for the "I started my startup" which is, in my opinion, amongst the hardest part (starting!).
vijaydev 16y ago
Nice idea! Congrats for the venture! A small feedback about the site. The email signup UI is the coolest I have seen. However, I would like the string "you@example.com" to be retained when I click in the text box and then click outside. Currently, it disappears when out of focus after clicking inside the text box once.
- andreyf 16y ago
  That's called placeholder test: http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html
  - vijaydev 16y ago
    Thanks for pointing out the right term. However, the site does not use HTML5 placeholder and instead rely on plain JS to do the trick. What I wished for was a behavior like in the demo here: http://diveintohtml5.org/examples/input-placeholder.html http://diveintohtml5.org/examples/input-placeholder.html
    - andreyf 16y ago
      I'd just use placeholder, and screw anyone using an old browser. If people can upgrade their cell phones every year, they can install a modern browser. ;)
kaens 16y ago
This is just insanely impressive.
japherwocky 16y ago
I worked for a "startup" in LA that did something like this. They had big funding, and big names, but were kind of incompetently run. I'll just say this: the government / military was verrry interested in the honeypot angle.
samwillis 16y ago
I think the most interesting aspect of this is that you have implemented a VNC client in JavaScript and HTML. That realy is your core technology and probably has the most value. I could see that being realy useful for implementing things like 3d CAD in the browser, the interface and controls could be plain HTML/CSS and use your vnc technology to show the 3d graphics being drawn on the server. Could you offer some insight into how your JavaScript vnc works?
- pkrumins 16y ago
  I'll soon start doing in-depth blogposts with examples on how stackvm works. But a quick summary is that we have node-rfb collect VNC updates, push them to node-png or node-jpeg which merges the updates and creates an image that then gets pushed via dnode to browser, which then draws it at the right location (absolute positioning of images).
altuzar 16y ago
I would love to see the recursive XP desktops. And a Hackintosh too! (Tiger runs well with VMWare, so maybe that's possible)
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y
barmstrong 16y ago
Very impressive - so is the main use case remote desktop without installing any software (Goto My PC killer)? Or browser testing? Or what? I think it's awesome I'm just having trouble visualizing a use case that isn't super nerdy.
rapind 16y ago
". You can easily rent 10 virtual machines with Linux, Windows, MacOS, and other operating systems and test your software." Linux I can see. Windows and especially OSX though, won't that create licensing issues and a special deal with MS / Apple to provide those VMs?
- pkrumins 16y ago
  We still have to figure out the licensing. We're currently more busy with hacking our software than thinking about licensing. So I don't have an answer for your questions.
mleonhard 16y ago
When I read your headline, I was excited to think that someone was building a VM service that was tailored to hosting webapps. I wish there was a service with a UI & API for configuring sites and starting up VMs to serve different areas of the site. For example, I could set up mysite.com on this service and then have requests for mysite.com/blog proxied to a VM running WordPress on PHP/MySQL. Requests for mysite.com/manage would be proxied to CherryPy stack running on another VM. Other requests for mysite.com/* would be served out of an S3 bucket. And of course the hosting service would do logging, monitoring, automatic error recovery, automatic scaling, backups, etc. You two are doing something different with StackVM, and it looks cool. I currently use FreeNX on EC2 and the NoMachine Windows client. Here are a couple of feature suggestions: 1. StackVM would be much more useful to me if the windows could pop out of the browser. I don't want to use a remote-desktop client that is confined to a browser window. 2. For real productivity, cut & paste must work between StackVM windows and other native apps. 3. Get James or someone with a lighter accent to do the demo video voiceovers. 4. Make it easy to deploy test environments, execute integration tests, and capture the results. For testing webapps, make it work with Selenium and keep videos of tests that fail. I would pay for this if it was sufficiently developed. I'm looking forward to the private demo. Good luck, you two! :)
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Thanks for the wishes. Now to address your suggestions: 1. That is awesome, I have added it to our wiki. This is easily doable and we'll probably implement it. 2. We haven't yet looked into implementing cut&paste. Should be doable. 3. James will join me in the next videos. 4. We're definitely building a test environment. We couldn't do it earlier because we didn't have a good remote method call execution framework, but now James wrote dnode [1] and we can get to implementing it! [1] http://github.com/substack/dnode http://github.com/substack/dnode
moolave 16y ago
This is awesome. Our company also does virtual appliances through different operating systems. It'd be nice to learn more. We also use the virtual appliances for exchange, saas, NFS, and web servers. Keep up the good work.
gojomo 16y ago
Cool. Is it only a matter of time before someone implements hardware virtualization in pure Javascript? Perhaps FireFox 10 will open machine instances as a supported MIME type.
teisho 16y ago
What are you using for the underlying virtualization?
- pkrumins 16y ago
  Currently VMWare and qemu. Virtualbox should also also work. Anything that runs VNC actually.
peteforde 16y ago
I just wanted to say congrats, good luck and one of you should be a 51% partner. Trust me, it's painful if a 50% partner takes off. Give this a read, paying specific attention to founder share vesting: http://startuplawyer.com/startup-issues/if-i-launched-a-startup http://startuplawyer.com/startup-issues/if-i-launched-a-star...
indrax 16y ago
>(like putting a virtual machine in a blog post) If this phrase were used in CSI it would be a joke by now.
coffee 16y ago
This looks great! Very excited about it after watching your demo video. Great job so far....

299 points by pkrumins 16y ago

That is a very cool idea, Peteris. I wish you the best of luck! A question, though: how do you plan to monetize it? Without a business model, it's a web app, but not really a startup.

pkrumins 16y ago
I thought the monetization was pretty obvious. I also mentioned it in the post. We're simply going to take care of your virtual machines (host them and make sure they always work) and give you awesome software to work with them!
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Sorry, my bad-- I don't know how I missed that paragraph! Doing this as a paid service from day one is definitely the right way to go. Again, good job.

jefffoster 16y ago

Have you seen http://www.spoon.net/ http://www.spoon.net/? It seems very similar to the StackVM idea.

pkrumins 16y ago
I hadn't seen spoon.net! Now investigating!
- nik61 16y ago
  But just another interesting web service that demands my card details before it will tell me how much anything costs! Fundamental mistake? I think so...
substack 16y ago
Thanks for pointing this out! Spoon seems to have found a nice niche in hosting up individual applications. StackVM right now is more about the entire operating system and geared towards hackers for the time being, but we may pivot into other areas. There are a lot of potential niches in this domain which is part of the reason why the problem is so exciting!
ydant 16y ago
They poorly handle the OS requirements (both in terms of implementation and notification). I had to go into the FAQ to find this: > Spoon currently supports Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, Firefox 3 and 3.5, and Safari 2, 3, and 4, on the Windows platform. Support for the Chrome and Opera browsers is coming soon! Which isn't even mentioned where you might expect - where they discuss the plug-in. If you go to any individual app in Linux (Chrome, FF3.5) you just get "this browser isn't supported".
- substack 16y ago
  Wow I had no idea! StackVM is all html and javascript and we've taken great care to make sure it works on all browsers without any silly plugins.
  - blueberry 16y ago
    you might want to rethink about plugins depending on your expected audience. People who are looking for good remote desktop solutions would be OK with installing plugins. I played the game on the front page on spoon.net and there was very little lag, it was a smooth experience. People who use remote desktop would prefer smooth experience over ease of installation.
    - substack 16y ago
      We plan to offer some kind of rdesktop or vnc backend for powerusers, since our software hooks into these on the backend anyways. This is a useful point!
    - SnowLprd 16y ago
      Completely disagree with this idea. If you can avoid browser plugins without major issue, and it seems you have been successful at that so far, by all means continue to do so. Not only will the technorati appreciate not having to install yet another piece of (usually unnecessary) software, but corporate customers will be more inclined to deploy in their environments if it means there won't be another piece of software for them to install and maintain across their entire enterprise.

koevet 16y ago

The use cases are exciting, I see a lot of potential for education purposes. Good luck!

pkrumins 16y ago
Thank you!

nailer 16y ago

Nice. I'd suggest demoing Windows XP before the Linux OS - not only is it more widely recognizable but there may be more users who have old desktop XP (or 98, etc) apps that could use your software.

pkrumins 16y ago
Thanks for the suggestion. Well, can't change this video anymore but I'll note that for future videos we'll be making!
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

ivenkys 16y ago

I can see a few use-cases where this can be quite useful especially if easy to use. To me the more interesting aspect of it is the - Complete open-source , idea-open and source-code open. For a startup looking for funding (applying to YC) , this is new, i wonder how it would gell with the investors.

substack 16y ago
Yeah, it is one of the big unknowns we are testing with this startup, but for us it makes a lot of sense. By being open about our technology, we hope to gain eyeballs, traction, and goodwill from fellow hackers who might be our future customers. By being open about our ideas, we expose them to criticism so that we can reform them to be more realistic and to exploit new opportunities that we hadn't considered.

blueberry 16y ago

Looks really impressive, congrats. I don't really see why it is called VM though, did you actually implement an emulator? How does this differ from online remote desktop solutions (say logmein)? Also if you want to reach beyond the geek community you might want to focus on a few of the ideas instead of the many ones that you currently have. For example, making the screencast great or making the demo of an application on a StackVM great. If you don't come up with a particular use case you might need to compete with giants like VMware or XEN.

pkrumins 16y ago
Hey, thanks. We didn't implement an emulator but since we're bringing virtual machines to the web, we decided to add 'VM' to our title to give an idea that this is related to virtual machines. Addressing your other questions, sure, we won't have like 100 features where we get lost ourselves. We'll have a small set of standard features and we'll have an API that will let developers hack on stackvm and make it do all other wonders. I don't know much about logmein at this point but they are corporate company and we are awesome and enthusiastic hackers.
- kordless 16y ago
  If it helps with anything you are doing, I wrote a quick and dirty project to launch EC2 instances for people to demo software during a class. http://code.google.com/p/fabulatr/ http://code.google.com/p/fabulatr/
- mitjak 16y ago
  I think it's actually the name that plaguing you at this point: it suggests that you're going to present another VM or, perhaps, something EC2 like.

ydant 16y ago

I was skeptical from the title. My first thought was "isn't this what EC2, and every other VPS provider does?" I have to admit, your pitch won me over - this looks interesting. On second thought, you did say "web", not "internet". I'm so used to people treating the two as synonymous that I didn't make the distinction myself. So I'd say make that more clear.

pkrumins 16y ago
Well, for most of the people "web" and "internet" are the same things. I think there was a Google experiment where they asked what is the internet, and people would just say internet explorer, meaning web is their internet.

DrJokepu 16y ago

Very interesting! Assuming that you will have reasonable pricing and a fast connection, I would be very interested in using this service for my own startup.

pkrumins 16y ago
Hi DrJokepu, I couldn't find your contact information so I am replying here. Can you reach me at peter@catonmat.net? I'd like to know more about how you'd use stackvm at your startup, so that when we launch stackvm we already had a usable product! Peteris

ndimopoulos 16y ago

Very good idea! I liked very much what I saw in the video. I agree with koevet this would be awesome for educational purposes. Keep up the good work!

pasbesoin 16y ago

Wishing you much luck. It's great to see you launching.

msy 16y ago

It's awesome to see a startup developing some genuinely new interesting tech rather than yet another project management or GTD app on $framework. Really neat stuff!

patrickk 16y ago

This is very cool. I could certainly see myself using this. The very best of luck with your YC application. A similar project you may get inspiration from: http://lifehacker.com/5590935/phpvirtualbox-manages-your-virtual-machines-remotely http://lifehacker.com/5590935/phpvirtualbox-manages-your-vir...

bootload 16y ago

"... At the moment StackVM is in its 3rd major iteration already and is almost entirely built on node.js. Since we're doing everything open-source, we've written a bunch of reusable node.js modules: ..." Most significant bit, many thx.

arvinb 16y ago

There's good potential for these kinds of app, especially now in the age of cloud computing.

duck 16y ago

This is one of those things that you would never think of, but once you see it you're blown away. Very cool and promising. Great job Peter.

pkrumins 16y ago
Thanks!

aquark 16y ago

This looks great! Any comments on how feasible Windows VMs will be to offer from a licensing perspective? Best of luck with this.

pkrumins 16y ago
We haven't really looked yet into licensing stuff. We'll do that quite later when we get ready to start offering the service. For now we're just building the stuff up and not thinking too much about anything else.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  That strikes me as dangerous - if MS Windows licenses then rule out what you're wanting to do you're up the creek without a paddle (perhaps you'll still ahve a spoon to paddle with, same system but only OSS VMs). If the licenses can be worked around then you're better building that I'd have thought.
- aaronbrethorst 16y ago
  I would recommend worrying about Windows licensing now. I worked for a company doing something quite similar for two years and I remember that Windows licensing is a bit of a sticky spot.

surki 16y ago

That's pretty neat. If you are going to support Windows, how does stackvm compare against "Terminal Services Web Access (TS Web Access)" [1] [1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771908(WS.10).aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771908(WS.10).a...

pkrumins 16y ago
Well, right here: "You must install TS Web Access on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008." With stackvm you don't have to install anything, no plugins, not even flash and you don't need a modern web browser. We're making our software work in all the browsers, even as old IE as 5.5.
- surki 16y ago
  OK, didn't see that one. But technically it should be possible to do that(i.e., pure web rendering through JS) for TS as well. What I meant to ask was - how does it compare using VNC against RDP. Probably you have through and rejected RDP, so was curious to know the technical details. (xrdp for Linux exists as well)
  - pkrumins 16y ago
    To be honest, we haven't looked at RDP yet. We're been building everything on top of VNC. We did not look because we didn't have the necessary libraries written like node-bufferlist (for easy binary protocol parsing) and dnode (for sending stuff around easily). But now that we have, we'll soon look into RDP.

chunkbot 16y ago

The use cases are really interesting; online product demos will be a killer feature, and we wouldn't have to worry about piracy (we're able to monitor the piracy rates of our desktop app, and it's about 25% of our paid subscriptions)...

pkrumins 16y ago
Hi chunkbot, Wanted to reach out to you through email but was unable to find any contact information. We'd like to work more closely with you on perfecting the online product demos feature. Would you be interested in testing it out on your website soon? Please contact me at peter@catonmat.net! Peteris

cmurphycode 16y ago

First, I have to say that this looks ambitious. There are some pretty exciting things in the gameplan; I am especially interested in the vmcasts idea. While I have to wonder if they can accomplish all of the ideas they lay out here, given the posts I've seen from catonmat.net before, I think they can do it. From what I can tell, Peteris is not just clever, but very motivated and loves to code and introspect his talents. This is usually a winning combination. I am excited you decided to open everything, but I wonder if you're going to be able to raise the money necessary to fund the infrastructure. Do either of you have a lot of business experience? If you can seize your opportunities well enough, you can probably monetize your idea while letting others do what they will with the code. Looking forward to see how this evolves.

pkrumins 16y ago
We don't have any business experience but we hope to gather enough attention that by the time we launch everyone wants a copy of our software already. :)

tomstuart 16y ago

Brilliant. I'm so disappointed you didn't open the XP VM inside XP's Chrome!

johkra 16y ago
That's exactly what I was wondering after he opened the terminal inside XP: What happens when you open a VM inside a VM?
- pkrumins 16y ago
  I tried it out, but forgot to do it in the demo. You get an awesome feedback/recursion effect! I'll try to do a video about it in a few hours and post it here. :D
- pkrumins 16y ago
  I have recorded the video, it's pretty awesome. Uploading to youtube in a minute!
- pkrumins 16y ago
  It's live! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y Also posted it to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536011 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1536011

barrkel 16y ago

I wouldn't be so positive about open-source everywhere. I'd recommend keeping some amount of the server-side closed source. The risk I see is that competitors can simply use your code and run the cheapest hardware they can find, while you have to run the cheapest hardware you can find and maintain and improve the software. Unless you have a different edge on the hardware side, you have no sustainable competitive advantage. So I'd suggest you stick with the open API, and perhaps have an open reference implementation, but add value in a secret sauce on the server side which competitors can't simply copy.

nollidge 16y ago
Surely they've already thought of this.
- barrkel 16y ago
  And I would expect my comment to elicit their thinking. From the post, it seems a little pollyannaish, paraphrasing: open source for the hackers, charging money from the start for the business, everybody wins, yay! On the other hand, perhaps their thinking on this is part of the secret sauce, and it's being kept secret for good reason.
deleted 16y ago
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- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  > Linode could offer this stack as an in browser way to access lish. Linode already has an in-browser interface to Lish, and I don't think Lish would work over VNC anyway, since it seems to operate on a lower level.
theBobMcCormick 16y ago
Open Source could be an advantage for them if they change their license to the AGPLv3. With an AGPLv3 license, any competitors would be required to make their modifications available for download. But as the copyright holder, the OP would not have to release any source he didn't want to, giving him the flexibility to run private, closed source extensions/enhancements if he chooses.

flyosity 16y ago

FWIW I think saying "doing a startup" sounds pretty childish. Why not say that you're starting a company? "Doing a startup" sounds like you're just messing around with a concept, testing the waters. "Starting a company" makes you look more serious, like you know what you're doing. Just my opinion.

kordless 16y ago
I think there is a certain sense of excitement and anticipation in the term. This is a new beginning and a start of a new life for these guys. Frankly, I could care less how they reference what they are doing, or whether or not they put .ly on the end of their name! As long as they are doing something relevant and are having a good time doing it, more power to them.
lkozma 16y ago
"just messing around with a concept, testing the waters" this might be exactly the best way to start something like this.
mahmud 16y ago
I, personally, appreciate the lack of pretension.

theBobMcCormick 16y ago

Have you considered offering a customer self hosted option? It sounds like you could easily position it as a lightweight alternative to Citrix and Windows Terminal Services.

pkrumins 16y ago
Sure, since the software is opensource, anyone can set it up and use it for self hosted vms.
- theBobMcCormick 16y ago
  I was thinking some kind of supported version or support agreement. Lots of companies won't run anything internally that doesn't come with some kind of vendor support.

gsk 16y ago

Excellent execution. I'd certainly be interested in the paid service when it comes out. The 100% opensource idea is probably a distraction you can do without at the moment. I want the paid service to be great. I won't care if it is opensource or not.

pkrumins 16y ago
The 100% opensource is actually very motivating. We want to create new libs that everyone else can use, then the same people who use it contribute back and fix bugs for us. It's lovely. And we can also reuse our libs later in more projects. Very awesome.

kirvyteo 16y ago

Cool stuff. The first thing I thought about was the latency. One of the problems running VNC or remote desktop over internet is always latency. I tried running VNC to EC2 instances for a test but the experience is terrible. It will be nice to see this run faster.

blueberry 16y ago

Based on the confusion that others and I had, I suggest changing your name and dropping VM from it. It really doesn't convey what you are trying to accomplish. When I first heard it, I thought you were making a VM together with an OS with an eccentric stack allocation algorithm or sth.

trainwreckin 16y ago
Personally I think that the chaps should focus on making the product even better instead of branding - the name can obviously change later when they decide to push for market release and by then they probably would be clever enough to seek the wisdom of someone to help them there.

d0m 16y ago

I would use it instead of always have to re-download putty when I'm not on a linux box. For the money part, you might also consider setting up the domain and redirect for a small fee. For instance, my-name.com could be my VMs securised with a password. Also, what is the limit of GB I can put on the VM? Say I want to upload files and mp3s.. is there a limit? May I pay to increase it? Finally, I would like to be able to connect to my VM from other way than web. Say I'm on my linux box with my terminal prompt, it would be nice if I could just ssh to my-name.com and get my VM.. upload/download stuff with scp, and connect to it with FTP. But of course, this would work more with the linux part I suppose :p Anyhow, congrats also for the "I started my startup" which is, in my opinion, amongst the hardest part (starting!).

vijaydev 16y ago

Nice idea! Congrats for the venture! A small feedback about the site. The email signup UI is the coolest I have seen. However, I would like the string "you@example.com" to be retained when I click in the text box and then click outside. Currently, it disappears when out of focus after clicking inside the text box once.

andreyf 16y ago
That's called placeholder test: http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html
- vijaydev 16y ago
  Thanks for pointing out the right term. However, the site does not use HTML5 placeholder and instead rely on plain JS to do the trick. What I wished for was a behavior like in the demo here: http://diveintohtml5.org/examples/input-placeholder.html http://diveintohtml5.org/examples/input-placeholder.html
  - andreyf 16y ago
    I'd just use placeholder, and screw anyone using an old browser. If people can upgrade their cell phones every year, they can install a modern browser. ;)

kaens 16y ago

This is just insanely impressive.

japherwocky 16y ago

I worked for a "startup" in LA that did something like this. They had big funding, and big names, but were kind of incompetently run. I'll just say this: the government / military was verrry interested in the honeypot angle.

samwillis 16y ago

I think the most interesting aspect of this is that you have implemented a VNC client in JavaScript and HTML. That realy is your core technology and probably has the most value. I could see that being realy useful for implementing things like 3d CAD in the browser, the interface and controls could be plain HTML/CSS and use your vnc technology to show the 3d graphics being drawn on the server. Could you offer some insight into how your JavaScript vnc works?

pkrumins 16y ago
I'll soon start doing in-depth blogposts with examples on how stackvm works. But a quick summary is that we have node-rfb collect VNC updates, push them to node-png or node-jpeg which merges the updates and creates an image that then gets pushed via dnode to browser, which then draws it at the right location (absolute positioning of images).

altuzar 16y ago

I would love to see the recursive XP desktops. And a Hackintosh too! (Tiger runs well with VMWare, so maybe that's possible)

pkrumins 16y ago
Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKFjJ9m_P8Y

barmstrong 16y ago

Very impressive - so is the main use case remote desktop without installing any software (Goto My PC killer)? Or browser testing? Or what? I think it's awesome I'm just having trouble visualizing a use case that isn't super nerdy.

rapind 16y ago

". You can easily rent 10 virtual machines with Linux, Windows, MacOS, and other operating systems and test your software." Linux I can see. Windows and especially OSX though, won't that create licensing issues and a special deal with MS / Apple to provide those VMs?

pkrumins 16y ago
We still have to figure out the licensing. We're currently more busy with hacking our software than thinking about licensing. So I don't have an answer for your questions.

mleonhard 16y ago

When I read your headline, I was excited to think that someone was building a VM service that was tailored to hosting webapps. I wish there was a service with a UI & API for configuring sites and starting up VMs to serve different areas of the site. For example, I could set up mysite.com on this service and then have requests for mysite.com/blog proxied to a VM running WordPress on PHP/MySQL. Requests for mysite.com/manage would be proxied to CherryPy stack running on another VM. Other requests for mysite.com/* would be served out of an S3 bucket. And of course the hosting service would do logging, monitoring, automatic error recovery, automatic scaling, backups, etc. You two are doing something different with StackVM, and it looks cool. I currently use FreeNX on EC2 and the NoMachine Windows client. Here are a couple of feature suggestions: 1. StackVM would be much more useful to me if the windows could pop out of the browser. I don't want to use a remote-desktop client that is confined to a browser window. 2. For real productivity, cut & paste must work between StackVM windows and other native apps. 3. Get James or someone with a lighter accent to do the demo video voiceovers. 4. Make it easy to deploy test environments, execute integration tests, and capture the results. For testing webapps, make it work with Selenium and keep videos of tests that fail. I would pay for this if it was sufficiently developed. I'm looking forward to the private demo. Good luck, you two! :)

pkrumins 16y ago
Thanks for the wishes. Now to address your suggestions: 1. That is awesome, I have added it to our wiki. This is easily doable and we'll probably implement it. 2. We haven't yet looked into implementing cut&paste. Should be doable. 3. James will join me in the next videos. 4. We're definitely building a test environment. We couldn't do it earlier because we didn't have a good remote method call execution framework, but now James wrote dnode [1] and we can get to implementing it! [1] http://github.com/substack/dnode http://github.com/substack/dnode

moolave 16y ago

This is awesome. Our company also does virtual appliances through different operating systems. It'd be nice to learn more. We also use the virtual appliances for exchange, saas, NFS, and web servers. Keep up the good work.

gojomo 16y ago

Cool. Is it only a matter of time before someone implements hardware virtualization in pure Javascript? Perhaps FireFox 10 will open machine instances as a supported MIME type.

teisho 16y ago

What are you using for the underlying virtualization?

pkrumins 16y ago
Currently VMWare and qemu. Virtualbox should also also work. Anything that runs VNC actually.

peteforde 16y ago

I just wanted to say congrats, good luck and one of you should be a 51% partner. Trust me, it's painful if a 50% partner takes off. Give this a read, paying specific attention to founder share vesting: http://startuplawyer.com/startup-issues/if-i-launched-a-startup http://startuplawyer.com/startup-issues/if-i-launched-a-star...

indrax 16y ago

>(like putting a virtual machine in a blog post) If this phrase were used in CSI it would be a joke by now.

coffee 16y ago

This looks great! Very excited about it after watching your demo video. Great job so far....