9 ms·

Hyper.sh cloud service will shut down on Jan 15

145 points by carimura 8y ago

simlevesque 8y ago
You say another, which other products are shutting down ?
- tmikaeld 8y ago
  Maybe this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683362 (backplane.io)
- dang 8y ago
  We changed the title from "Yet another holiday shutdown: Hyper.sh" to one that is less baity and uses representative language from the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
josep2 8y ago
I JUST signed up for their service this week. :(.
- mirceal 8y ago
  you should consider yourself lucky. you could have signed up a while ago and invested in it
zoobab 8y ago
I thought it was a brilliant idea for builds. Not many customers?
benatkin 8y ago
less confusion for https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/
- patneedham 8y ago
  Exactly what I thought the link referred to initially.
- JensRex 8y ago
  >...is an Electron-based Alt-F4
ruffrey 8y ago
This seems like a sudden shut down, only giving users a few weeks to migrate.
publicfig 8y ago
Weird, no statement or anything that I can find, just a banner at the top of the page. As well, they're shutting off service in less than a month during a time in the year when at least many western countries have limited staff/availability due to holidays. While I understand that once they decide they will no longer be operating, they don't have a legitimate business reason to help (former) customers ease through the transition, it really seems like they went out of their way to be as customer-hostile as they could. EDIT: Looks like an email went out (copied in a comment below) and that they are not shutting down as an organization, just this product. Even more curious as to why they'd offer such a short migration window to former customers. I would, especially in an organization, be truly hesitant to rely on any of their other technologies if this is the pattern being set.
- benatkin 8y ago
  This is somewhat common. They've probably emailed all their customers with more details. One of them can post a screenshot of their email and link it here.
- Lab3301 8y ago
  Here's a copy of the email I received: We are writing to let you know that we decided to pursue a new direction in 2019, and will be closing down the Hyper.sh cloud platform on January 15, 2019. Over three years ago, we set out to create an open secure container-native platform. We believed that containers represented a sea change in how software would be developed, deployed, and maintained. Along the way, we created one of the first container-native cloud offerings, the Hyper.sh platform, which utilized our open source technology, called runV, which last year was merged with Intel’s Clear Containers project to become Kata Containers. We’re proud of the platform we built, and the influence we have had on the overall container industry. We are even more grateful to you, our customers, who have deployed hundreds of thousands of containers and built out new business on our platform. The Hyper.sh platform, while trailblazing, is not where Hyper’s future efforts lie. Moving forward, Hyper is focusing all our attention and efforts towards the upstream Kata Containers project and in developing our Enterprise Kata stack for deployment in the major public clouds. As of today, it is no longer possible to create a new account on Hyper.sh, and on January 15, 2019, the Hyper.sh cloud service will be shut down. Per section 11 of our terms of service, we wanted to provide you time to migrate off the platform and for the next month, our priority is to help your transition to other cloud services. If you need assistance, please feel free to reach out to us via Slack or your account dashboard. On January 15, 2019 any remaining user data and accounts will be deleted from the platform. Please start now migrating your containers and data volumes off the platform. Directions on how to migrate your container volumes can be followed here. Please note, you will not be charged for either the container or the FIP in performing the migration. Thank you for your business and support of our platform. It has been a privilege to serve you. Sincerely, The Hyper Crew
arvidkahl 8y ago
> The Hyper.sh platform, while trailblazing, is not where Hyper’s future efforts lie. Moving forward, Hyper is focusing all our attention and efforts towards the upstream Kata Containers project and in developing our Enterprise Kata stack for deployment in the major public clouds. (From the shutdown email users received) I was not aware of these products. Interesting.
- swozey 8y ago
  kata (Intel clear containers + hypers runv) is big in the nested virtualization space but is still a tiny project (contributor wise) consisting of mostly Redhat. It's unlikely you'd run into these projects if you're not at an IAAS or dealing with containers accessing custom hardware (fpgas, gpus, etc). They're really cool, along with gvisor, kubevirt, nemu, etc. The really exciting part is everyone is using these projects for extremely different reasons. IAAS, rendering farms, android emulators, it's a really fun project to watch. I think in the future there will be a big shift off of runc (docker) as the k8s default runtime now that CRIO has made them pluggable.
  - cyphar 8y ago
    > I think in the future there will be a big shift off of runc (docker) as the k8s default runtime now that CRIO has made them pluggable. I don't think there's going to be a big shift away from runc (though I'm biased, I'm one of the runc maintainers -- and runc is quite separate from Docker) for a couple of reasons: 1. Containers are still more than decent, and will always handle certain usecases and setups better than VMs can (due to the pliability of namespaces and shared kernels -- VMs have the fixed DRAM problem just like they always have). 2. At the moment, plain containers are arguably more secure than kata containers (though this can be fixed "fairly" easily with some minor memory penalties) because they disable a bunch of security features in their VM kernels -- so you don't get seccomp or AppArmor protections for your containers. Now, you do get hypervisor security, but there was a study some time ago which claimed that a well-tuned seccomp profile is about as secure as a hypervisor. 3. Hooks (like the NVIDIA ones) will always work better with plain containers because the whole idea behind hooking into a container runtime is that you can attach things to the containers' namespaces (with NVIDIA this would be vGPUs). kata is trying (and succeeding in most cases) to emulate these sorts of pluggable components with their agent, but fundamentally they're trying to pretend to be a container (which is going to cause problems). I think kata is a really good project (and I'm happy that Intel and Hyper.sh joined forces), but I don't think it will replace ordinary containers entirely (even under Kubernetes). But hey, I could be proven wrong -- at which point I'll switch to working on LXC. :P
reacharavindh 8y ago
The promise of "Speed of containers and security of VMs" is enticing, but is there a simple 101/quickstart for somebody that just wants to run one container in this way? as in no Kubernetes, OpenStack, Multi-tenancy, nothing..... Just one bare-metal server, configured as KVM host, and how can I [run/start/stop] one Kata container? I feel like everyone just assumes you're a Kubernetes Pro and runs infrastructure at the scale of Google/FB/Amazon these days... :-(
- kevinsimper 8y ago
  That is where serverless is really awesome as it give you scale and flexibility, and the providers behind are using containers
- pliu 8y ago
  The documentation for kata seems fairly straightforward for a single host install. Install the kata packages, modify docker daemon to change the run time, then use Docker the usual way. https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/blob/master/install/docker/ubuntu-docker-install.md https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/blob/master...
- swozey 8y ago
  k8s is really just the scheduler and gives you a uniform way to deploy the "vm" containers in the usual scenario. With k8s you can have workloads run on different runtimes like trusted=runc, untrusted=kata, etc and this is even easier now with RuntimeClass which you can write right inside of a regular k8s deployment yaml. Kata is actually just several binaries that talk via grpc (kata-agent, shim, proxy, runtime) and interface with QEMU/NEMU. For instance kata-proxy proxies commands over virtios serial interface that's exposed via QEMU. You could install the binaries and qemu-lite and have a similar system but I'm not really sure how you'd benefit as it's the management through k8s that really won me over. I think in your scenario you'd just be making very complicated QEMU vms. I've linked this to the contribs, maybe they have some thoughts.
philipswood 8y ago
Sad to see them go. They were easy to use and cost effective (for my use cases at least). They have some really cool underlying tech. I can't say I'm surprised though - there have been signs that this was coming.
- yardstick 8y ago
  I’m curious, what signs were there that they might/would be shutting down the service?
  - philipswood 8y ago
    The forums quieted down. Direct product and support questions in the forums were unanswered. Frequent changes, almost pivots, in product development. No updates in github repos for key product related software.
the_duke 8y ago
Less then a month migration period. If you factor in that not much work is getting done in many western countries until early January the actual migration time is more like less than two weeks. Now I don't know how easy it is to move from hyper.sh to alternatives, but that is unprofessionally short regardless. I would have expected at least three months. Is it possible that they are that short on money that they need to shut it down immediately? Seems like it. Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic.
- shawnz 8y ago
  > Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic. We need SaaS: Services as a Service
  - Spivak 8y ago
    You're basically describing Openshift.
- ticmasta 8y ago
  Maybe they don't have any customers for this product? If they do however, it's a dick move to pull out the rug with this much notice over a period when a lot of people are away for much of it...
  - bartread 8y ago
    Well, they're not out of cash - at least not right now. It appears to be a pivot. I'd therefore have to agree with your assessment that it's a dick move.
  - arcticfox 8y ago
    > Maybe they don't have any customers for this product? I don't think they have many, but I'm one of them. Not pleased at all w/ the migration time.
- 8y ago
cellis 8y ago
Wow! Just checked my email and got this. I was considering using this, but KNEW I couldn’t have built parts of my infra around this, because of one thing: the pricing. I even sent a message on their website asking what their roadmap was. After not getting a response for days, I figured the end was nigh. It was far too low to build a sustainable business around, and so I decided to write my own stack. What I needed they served very well ( ability to run one-shot docker containers as an HTTP rpc ) — similar to AWS Fargate but much much simpler. Fargates’ RunTask is close but requires way too much configuration of roles and permissions and “provisioning” just to run a container. And even at the scale AWS is providing fargate, their pricing was still higher! I remember the AWS pricing being something like 5c / hr priced out in seconds, but with a minimum charge of 1 minute, but hyper.sh was 1c/hr with a min charge of only 10s! So, roughly here’s why they’re going out of business: the business requires very scaley things ( think dinosaur not lizard ) in order to make very small amounts of money. And it’s making 1/5th of the market dominant service.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  What would be good pricing in your point of view?
  - cellis 8y ago
    Micro pricing only works when your customer is running high frequency transactions. I would have been happy to pay $25 but even 50-100/ month for a starter service that does this well.
    - elcritch 8y ago
      Have you tried DigitalOcean Ocean or Joyent to see how they compare in complexity to AWS Fargate?
wolfgang42 8y ago
I was just considering using this service for a side project that needed isolated containers to run jobs in. Anyone have suggestions for similar alternative services?
- s09dfhks 8y ago
  gitlab?
  - wolfgang42 8y ago
    I think "builds" was the wrong term. (I've edited it to "jobs" above.) GitLab CI is great, but I don't know if it fits my use case, which is running intermittent batch conversions. I was planning on using hyper.sh to spin up containers on demand, instead of having to maintain a job server and queue of my own.
- manigandham 8y ago
  To just run a container and have it available over the web? Azure has Azure Container Instances. AWS has Fargate. Zeit has Docker deploys with v1. GCP is coming soon with Serverless Containers.
  - wolfgang42 8y ago
    No, for short-lived (a minute or two per run) batch jobs. But, it looks like most of the ones you mentioned can also be used for that sort of task. Thanks!
    - miaklesp 8y ago
      Azure Container Instance billed per second, specifically for short lived tasks.
- cellis 8y ago
  Me too, ( see thread for my comment ). I decided in the end that using my own ec2 Ubuntu t2 micro was simpler and far cheaper to run than using and configuring Fargate. I assume you want to execute untrusted code (e.g. run CI on behalf of customers or provide a repl.it-like service), like I’m doing? I couldn’t find a good service that did this well ( well I did find hyper.sh ).
euph0ria 8y ago
Woa... I was evaluating this service a couple of months ago. The conclusion was, even if it looks nice the major downside was that the company hadn't been around long enough and we didn't know if they were profitable. These kinds of moves with sub-30 days during major holidays is really scary. I feel for everyone out there having to work during the holidays. I hope the CEO did this out of financial necessities. Otherwise he should be put on some type of do-not-purchase-from-these-founders-blacklist.
- ergothus 8y ago
  > Otherwise he should be put on some type of do-not-purchase-from-these-founders-blacklist. Does such a blacklist exist? Given the short notice I expected that Hyper.sh would be gone (and thus free of commercial backlash) but it appears the company will continue in new areas, which makes this decision even more surprising. I'd definitely be interested in having such a list and an easy way to determine if they are involved in new companies, which doesn't sound trivial. "Foo Co was terrible to their customers" doesn't tell me Bob made the decisions, nor does that tell me that Bar Co is also run by Bob.
  - gtirloni 8y ago
    The usual HN feedback for trying to track bad CEOs so you don't get bit in the future is that we shouldn't because they're humans who make mistakes and always deserve second chances. Not saying I agree but it's what I've noticed.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  Hah I did the exact same thing. Neat product that I wanted to build something new on, but I didn’t trust that this company would be around in a year.
tanilama 8y ago
Well I guess that is one valuable lesson to not choose no name company as your cloud provider. Big buddy is your friend.
wanghq 8y ago
Sad to see this. What happened to the "serverless containers", especially startups working on the idea? Months ago, Zeit.co gave up the idea of hosting containers and changed their direction to FaaS . Wondering if there is a technical reason (e.g. cost effective and scalable) behind both changes. On the other hand, big cloud vendors are all providing the serverless containers while the experience may not be as smooth as the startups provide.
- NathanKP 8y ago
  AWS employee here. Serverless containers are hard, and there are a lot of technical challenges along the way. For context when we launched ECS years ago the goal was always to build a serverless container platform. But first we had to build out our own container orchestration platform capable of keeping track of all the containers at the scale that AWS requires, and build out a lot of underlying tech that didn't exist yet. Recently we open sourced Firecracker (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...) which is one of the pieces we built along the way to enable the data plane. It took us a few years to get to this point, which is a really long time in startup lifetime. The major cloud providers have the resources to spend a lot of time building the technical depth required to offer full featured serverless container platforms that can truly scale up and out. In my view the smaller providers like hyper.sh really nailed the initial developer experience but they are missing the depth behind the scenes that allows serverless containers to be scaled out cost effectively. In time these two ends of the spectrum will hopefully converge. By open sourcing tech like Firecracker AWS enables small providers to have access to tech that we built because we needed it, and now its available for them to use. Conversely AWS learns how to improve our developer experience by seeing how these small startups create a great developer experience.
  - simonw 8y ago
    The best developer experience I have ever had was Zeit Now v1 - their serverless containers product. I would absolutely love for AWS to offer something similar (serverless Docker containers where I only pay for the periods during which they are serving traffic), ideally with a similar developer experience. Nothing puts me off faster than having to click through dozens of web UI screens (or read a hundred pages of API docs) just to get a container launched and accessible via a URL. The Zeit Now v1 model, with everything configured from a single (optional) JSON config file and deployed with a single "now" CLI command, was absolutely ideal for me.
bo0tzz 8y ago
I've been looking for a service like this for a while, and the first I find out about it is that it's shutting down. Does anyone know of similar offerings that are as simple? I know AWS, GCP and the likes offer container clusters, but I would like to just run a single container (for cheap) and not worry about it.
- kasia66 8y ago
  This is a short overview of Kubernetes and major cloud providers offering (AWS ECS, EKS, Fargate, Azure AKS, GKE, and DigitalOcean) https://blog.cloud66.com/public-cloud-managed-kubernetes-our-hands-on-experience/ https://blog.cloud66.com/public-cloud-managed-kubernetes-our...
- NathanKP 8y ago
  AWS employee here: I'm going to be honest AWS Fargate isn't as easy to use as hyper.sh if you are looking for an alternative. That said our increased complexity is because Fargate is orders of magnitude more full featured for applications that outgrow small platforms. If you want to give Fargate a try I'd recommend this open source tool (http://somanymachines.com/fargate/ http://somanymachines.com/fargate/) as it provides you with an easy, opinionated starter command line experience similar to what you might have seen for hyper.sh
- jimmcslim 8y ago
  Azure App Service's 'Web App for Containers' [1] allows you to run a container, but might not meet your definition of cheap. Also consider Azure Container Instances [2] [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/app-service/containers/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/app-service/conta... [2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/container-instances/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/container-instanc...
- thesandlord 8y ago
  GCP Employee here. You can run a container on a f1-micro VM for free forever: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/deploying-containers#deploying_a_container_on_a_new_vm_instance https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/deploying-c... If you want something more similar to Hyper.sh, serverless containers are coming out publicly soon, and you can sign up for the alpha here: https://g.co/serverlesscontainers https://g.co/serverlesscontainers
deforciant 8y ago
I used Hyper.sh for my side project 2 years ago during the initial development phase. It was really easy to start with but I wouldn't say it was stable. Every month or so there would be downtimes or the container would run but for example networks wouldn't work. Or storage volumes wouldn't mount/unmount.. :) After several downtimes I switched to Google's GKE and never looked back. Hyper is easy to start with but impossible to finish. There was no managed database at that time (not sure whether they had it now) and using Postgres with their persistent volumes (which are backed by Ceph I think) performance was really sad. All in all, it was a great service for trying out ideas or running small & less important applications, but if you really want it to always be available, then probably it's not the right tool.
whoisjuan 8y ago
Just found out about this service. It looks like a solid concept. Any alternatives out there?
charlieegan3 8y ago
They had a cron feature which was really good. I've switched to running a Kubernetes cluster for my side projects but Hyper.sh cron was really easy to get started with.
- smarterclayton 8y ago
  Any specific areas for Kubernetes to focus on?
  - charlieegan3 8y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. As in, is there something k8s might do better with its CronJob feature? I don't think so no... If you just wanted to run a container on a schedule, and you didn't have a cluster running already, Hyper sh was a lower bar to do that. If you do have a cluster, using a CronJob on said cluster is easier for me than maintaining something on Hyper sh... I might have missed the question...
tonicbbleking 8y ago
Zeit is dropping the support for containers for their v2 and now Hyper is shutting down their services. Any other one sentence deploy ("now" or "hyper run") for containers available out there?
- friedman23 8y ago
  App engine is really nice, it's `gcloud app deploy` and they have support for multistage deploys. I had to drop them because it's hard to start a HIPAA compliant product on their platform as a solo dev. AWS on the other hand signs a BAA with you with the click a button. This forced me to learn AWS and to learn that all I really need for the MVP is a single EC2 instance, RDS, a redis subscription from redis labs, and cloud watch. Deploying is just pulling from github, shutting down the service and restarting it. It doesn't really need to be simpler than that. I'm pretty sure that I could scale to 10k users per day on 1 ec2 instance and by that point I would hopefully have venture capital and hire an expert to handle all this for me.
vertis 8y ago
This really sucks for those that have invested in the platform and now have less than a month of warning. If anyone needs help migrating off hyper.sh I am pretty free over the holiday period. I have extensive DevOps experience. I'm happy to help (gratis). My email is on my profile.
Walkman 8y ago
It's a shame. It was one of the most innovative cloud provider and my personal favourite.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ahallock 8y ago
I was planning on using this for my side project. I thought it looked great for MVPs and small projects. What happened?
cpursley 8y ago
Wow, a two week notice for an infrastructure provider is borderline criminal. I'm out for the holiday during this period... Guess it's going to be a scramble to get back on reliable 'ole Heroku for me. What a nightmare.
ksajadi 8y ago
Over the past 5 years I’ve seen too mans PaaS provider shutdown. Every time those affected ask why and my answer is the same: PaaS is a great tool but an awful business. We studied many PaaS providers and their business model and I believe there are fundamental business issues with a PaaS provider that provides infrastructure as well as the platform. The only way to survive the market is to have a rich owner (like Heroku / Salesforce), be a cloud provider (GoogleApps), run it yourself (DIY Kubernetes like solutions) or use a service that manages a PaaS on your own servers (Cloud 66).
revskill 8y ago
What is hyper.sh ?
petercooper 8y ago
I note that their Twitter account has had no activity for a few months. This seems to be a common thing with services that shut down or products that get discontinued. Makes me wonder.. maybe it's worth building a tool that monitors the Twitter accounts of common services and products and raises a bat signal if they don't tweet for a month or two. It seems to be where budget gets tightened first.
XorNot 8y ago
Interesting to see one of these happen. Put me down for this happening to Mongo's Stitch product next.
0xbkt 8y ago
In fact, I felt this coming since quite a long time. One day, they abrubtly shut down their Pi (serverless K8s) without a notification. Their forum was deserted. A little activity in Slack. Nothing but these.

145 points by carimura 8y ago

simlevesque 8y ago

You say another, which other products are shutting down ?

tmikaeld 8y ago
Maybe this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18683362 (backplane.io)
dang 8y ago
We changed the title from "Yet another holiday shutdown: Hyper.sh" to one that is less baity and uses representative language from the article. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

josep2 8y ago

I JUST signed up for their service this week. :(.

mirceal 8y ago
you should consider yourself lucky. you could have signed up a while ago and invested in it

zoobab 8y ago

I thought it was a brilliant idea for builds. Not many customers?

benatkin 8y ago

less confusion for https://hyper.is/ https://hyper.is/

patneedham 8y ago
Exactly what I thought the link referred to initially.
JensRex 8y ago
>...is an Electron-based Alt-F4

ruffrey 8y ago

This seems like a sudden shut down, only giving users a few weeks to migrate.

publicfig 8y ago

Weird, no statement or anything that I can find, just a banner at the top of the page. As well, they're shutting off service in less than a month during a time in the year when at least many western countries have limited staff/availability due to holidays. While I understand that once they decide they will no longer be operating, they don't have a legitimate business reason to help (former) customers ease through the transition, it really seems like they went out of their way to be as customer-hostile as they could. EDIT: Looks like an email went out (copied in a comment below) and that they are not shutting down as an organization, just this product. Even more curious as to why they'd offer such a short migration window to former customers. I would, especially in an organization, be truly hesitant to rely on any of their other technologies if this is the pattern being set.

benatkin 8y ago
This is somewhat common. They've probably emailed all their customers with more details. One of them can post a screenshot of their email and link it here.
Lab3301 8y ago
Here's a copy of the email I received: We are writing to let you know that we decided to pursue a new direction in 2019, and will be closing down the Hyper.sh cloud platform on January 15, 2019. Over three years ago, we set out to create an open secure container-native platform. We believed that containers represented a sea change in how software would be developed, deployed, and maintained. Along the way, we created one of the first container-native cloud offerings, the Hyper.sh platform, which utilized our open source technology, called runV, which last year was merged with Intel’s Clear Containers project to become Kata Containers. We’re proud of the platform we built, and the influence we have had on the overall container industry. We are even more grateful to you, our customers, who have deployed hundreds of thousands of containers and built out new business on our platform. The Hyper.sh platform, while trailblazing, is not where Hyper’s future efforts lie. Moving forward, Hyper is focusing all our attention and efforts towards the upstream Kata Containers project and in developing our Enterprise Kata stack for deployment in the major public clouds. As of today, it is no longer possible to create a new account on Hyper.sh, and on January 15, 2019, the Hyper.sh cloud service will be shut down. Per section 11 of our terms of service, we wanted to provide you time to migrate off the platform and for the next month, our priority is to help your transition to other cloud services. If you need assistance, please feel free to reach out to us via Slack or your account dashboard. On January 15, 2019 any remaining user data and accounts will be deleted from the platform. Please start now migrating your containers and data volumes off the platform. Directions on how to migrate your container volumes can be followed here. Please note, you will not be charged for either the container or the FIP in performing the migration. Thank you for your business and support of our platform. It has been a privilege to serve you. Sincerely, The Hyper Crew

arvidkahl 8y ago

> The Hyper.sh platform, while trailblazing, is not where Hyper’s future efforts lie. Moving forward, Hyper is focusing all our attention and efforts towards the upstream Kata Containers project and in developing our Enterprise Kata stack for deployment in the major public clouds. (From the shutdown email users received) I was not aware of these products. Interesting.

swozey 8y ago
kata (Intel clear containers + hypers runv) is big in the nested virtualization space but is still a tiny project (contributor wise) consisting of mostly Redhat. It's unlikely you'd run into these projects if you're not at an IAAS or dealing with containers accessing custom hardware (fpgas, gpus, etc). They're really cool, along with gvisor, kubevirt, nemu, etc. The really exciting part is everyone is using these projects for extremely different reasons. IAAS, rendering farms, android emulators, it's a really fun project to watch. I think in the future there will be a big shift off of runc (docker) as the k8s default runtime now that CRIO has made them pluggable.
- cyphar 8y ago
  > I think in the future there will be a big shift off of runc (docker) as the k8s default runtime now that CRIO has made them pluggable. I don't think there's going to be a big shift away from runc (though I'm biased, I'm one of the runc maintainers -- and runc is quite separate from Docker) for a couple of reasons: 1. Containers are still more than decent, and will always handle certain usecases and setups better than VMs can (due to the pliability of namespaces and shared kernels -- VMs have the fixed DRAM problem just like they always have). 2. At the moment, plain containers are arguably more secure than kata containers (though this can be fixed "fairly" easily with some minor memory penalties) because they disable a bunch of security features in their VM kernels -- so you don't get seccomp or AppArmor protections for your containers. Now, you do get hypervisor security, but there was a study some time ago which claimed that a well-tuned seccomp profile is about as secure as a hypervisor. 3. Hooks (like the NVIDIA ones) will always work better with plain containers because the whole idea behind hooking into a container runtime is that you can attach things to the containers' namespaces (with NVIDIA this would be vGPUs). kata is trying (and succeeding in most cases) to emulate these sorts of pluggable components with their agent, but fundamentally they're trying to pretend to be a container (which is going to cause problems). I think kata is a really good project (and I'm happy that Intel and Hyper.sh joined forces), but I don't think it will replace ordinary containers entirely (even under Kubernetes). But hey, I could be proven wrong -- at which point I'll switch to working on LXC. :P

reacharavindh 8y ago

The promise of "Speed of containers and security of VMs" is enticing, but is there a simple 101/quickstart for somebody that just wants to run one container in this way? as in no Kubernetes, OpenStack, Multi-tenancy, nothing..... Just one bare-metal server, configured as KVM host, and how can I [run/start/stop] one Kata container? I feel like everyone just assumes you're a Kubernetes Pro and runs infrastructure at the scale of Google/FB/Amazon these days... :-(

kevinsimper 8y ago
That is where serverless is really awesome as it give you scale and flexibility, and the providers behind are using containers
pliu 8y ago
The documentation for kata seems fairly straightforward for a single host install. Install the kata packages, modify docker daemon to change the run time, then use Docker the usual way. https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/blob/master/install/docker/ubuntu-docker-install.md https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/blob/master...
swozey 8y ago
k8s is really just the scheduler and gives you a uniform way to deploy the "vm" containers in the usual scenario. With k8s you can have workloads run on different runtimes like trusted=runc, untrusted=kata, etc and this is even easier now with RuntimeClass which you can write right inside of a regular k8s deployment yaml. Kata is actually just several binaries that talk via grpc (kata-agent, shim, proxy, runtime) and interface with QEMU/NEMU. For instance kata-proxy proxies commands over virtios serial interface that's exposed via QEMU. You could install the binaries and qemu-lite and have a similar system but I'm not really sure how you'd benefit as it's the management through k8s that really won me over. I think in your scenario you'd just be making very complicated QEMU vms. I've linked this to the contribs, maybe they have some thoughts.

philipswood 8y ago

Sad to see them go. They were easy to use and cost effective (for my use cases at least). They have some really cool underlying tech. I can't say I'm surprised though - there have been signs that this was coming.

yardstick 8y ago
I’m curious, what signs were there that they might/would be shutting down the service?
- philipswood 8y ago
  The forums quieted down. Direct product and support questions in the forums were unanswered. Frequent changes, almost pivots, in product development. No updates in github repos for key product related software.

the_duke 8y ago

Less then a month migration period. If you factor in that not much work is getting done in many western countries until early January the actual migration time is more like less than two weeks. Now I don't know how easy it is to move from hyper.sh to alternatives, but that is unprofessionally short regardless. I would have expected at least three months. Is it possible that they are that short on money that they need to shut it down immediately? Seems like it. Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic.

shawnz 8y ago
> Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic. We need SaaS: Services as a Service
- Spivak 8y ago
  You're basically describing Openshift.
ticmasta 8y ago
Maybe they don't have any customers for this product? If they do however, it's a dick move to pull out the rug with this much notice over a period when a lot of people are away for much of it...
- bartread 8y ago
  Well, they're not out of cash - at least not right now. It appears to be a pivot. I'd therefore have to agree with your assessment that it's a dick move.
- arcticfox 8y ago
  > Maybe they don't have any customers for this product? I don't think they have many, but I'm one of them. Not pleased at all w/ the migration time.
8y ago

cellis 8y ago

Wow! Just checked my email and got this. I was considering using this, but KNEW I couldn’t have built parts of my infra around this, because of one thing: the pricing. I even sent a message on their website asking what their roadmap was. After not getting a response for days, I figured the end was nigh. It was far too low to build a sustainable business around, and so I decided to write my own stack. What I needed they served very well ( ability to run one-shot docker containers as an HTTP rpc ) — similar to AWS Fargate but much much simpler. Fargates’ RunTask is close but requires way too much configuration of roles and permissions and “provisioning” just to run a container. And even at the scale AWS is providing fargate, their pricing was still higher! I remember the AWS pricing being something like 5c / hr priced out in seconds, but with a minimum charge of 1 minute, but hyper.sh was 1c/hr with a min charge of only 10s! So, roughly here’s why they’re going out of business: the business requires very scaley things ( think dinosaur not lizard ) in order to make very small amounts of money. And it’s making 1/5th of the market dominant service.

TomMarius 8y ago
What would be good pricing in your point of view?
- cellis 8y ago
  Micro pricing only works when your customer is running high frequency transactions. I would have been happy to pay $25 but even 50-100/ month for a starter service that does this well.
  - elcritch 8y ago
    Have you tried DigitalOcean Ocean or Joyent to see how they compare in complexity to AWS Fargate?

wolfgang42 8y ago

I was just considering using this service for a side project that needed isolated containers to run jobs in. Anyone have suggestions for similar alternative services?

s09dfhks 8y ago
gitlab?
- wolfgang42 8y ago
  I think "builds" was the wrong term. (I've edited it to "jobs" above.) GitLab CI is great, but I don't know if it fits my use case, which is running intermittent batch conversions. I was planning on using hyper.sh to spin up containers on demand, instead of having to maintain a job server and queue of my own.
manigandham 8y ago
To just run a container and have it available over the web? Azure has Azure Container Instances. AWS has Fargate. Zeit has Docker deploys with v1. GCP is coming soon with Serverless Containers.
- wolfgang42 8y ago
  No, for short-lived (a minute or two per run) batch jobs. But, it looks like most of the ones you mentioned can also be used for that sort of task. Thanks!
  - miaklesp 8y ago
    Azure Container Instance billed per second, specifically for short lived tasks.
cellis 8y ago
Me too, ( see thread for my comment ). I decided in the end that using my own ec2 Ubuntu t2 micro was simpler and far cheaper to run than using and configuring Fargate. I assume you want to execute untrusted code (e.g. run CI on behalf of customers or provide a repl.it-like service), like I’m doing? I couldn’t find a good service that did this well ( well I did find hyper.sh ).

euph0ria 8y ago

Woa... I was evaluating this service a couple of months ago. The conclusion was, even if it looks nice the major downside was that the company hadn't been around long enough and we didn't know if they were profitable. These kinds of moves with sub-30 days during major holidays is really scary. I feel for everyone out there having to work during the holidays. I hope the CEO did this out of financial necessities. Otherwise he should be put on some type of do-not-purchase-from-these-founders-blacklist.

ergothus 8y ago
> Otherwise he should be put on some type of do-not-purchase-from-these-founders-blacklist. Does such a blacklist exist? Given the short notice I expected that Hyper.sh would be gone (and thus free of commercial backlash) but it appears the company will continue in new areas, which makes this decision even more surprising. I'd definitely be interested in having such a list and an easy way to determine if they are involved in new companies, which doesn't sound trivial. "Foo Co was terrible to their customers" doesn't tell me Bob made the decisions, nor does that tell me that Bar Co is also run by Bob.
- gtirloni 8y ago
  The usual HN feedback for trying to track bad CEOs so you don't get bit in the future is that we shouldn't because they're humans who make mistakes and always deserve second chances. Not saying I agree but it's what I've noticed.
eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
Hah I did the exact same thing. Neat product that I wanted to build something new on, but I didn’t trust that this company would be around in a year.

tanilama 8y ago

Well I guess that is one valuable lesson to not choose no name company as your cloud provider. Big buddy is your friend.

wanghq 8y ago

Sad to see this. What happened to the "serverless containers", especially startups working on the idea? Months ago, Zeit.co gave up the idea of hosting containers and changed their direction to FaaS . Wondering if there is a technical reason (e.g. cost effective and scalable) behind both changes. On the other hand, big cloud vendors are all providing the serverless containers while the experience may not be as smooth as the startups provide.

NathanKP 8y ago
AWS employee here. Serverless containers are hard, and there are a lot of technical challenges along the way. For context when we launched ECS years ago the goal was always to build a serverless container platform. But first we had to build out our own container orchestration platform capable of keeping track of all the containers at the scale that AWS requires, and build out a lot of underlying tech that didn't exist yet. Recently we open sourced Firecracker (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...) which is one of the pieces we built along the way to enable the data plane. It took us a few years to get to this point, which is a really long time in startup lifetime. The major cloud providers have the resources to spend a lot of time building the technical depth required to offer full featured serverless container platforms that can truly scale up and out. In my view the smaller providers like hyper.sh really nailed the initial developer experience but they are missing the depth behind the scenes that allows serverless containers to be scaled out cost effectively. In time these two ends of the spectrum will hopefully converge. By open sourcing tech like Firecracker AWS enables small providers to have access to tech that we built because we needed it, and now its available for them to use. Conversely AWS learns how to improve our developer experience by seeing how these small startups create a great developer experience.
- simonw 8y ago
  The best developer experience I have ever had was Zeit Now v1 - their serverless containers product. I would absolutely love for AWS to offer something similar (serverless Docker containers where I only pay for the periods during which they are serving traffic), ideally with a similar developer experience. Nothing puts me off faster than having to click through dozens of web UI screens (or read a hundred pages of API docs) just to get a container launched and accessible via a URL. The Zeit Now v1 model, with everything configured from a single (optional) JSON config file and deployed with a single "now" CLI command, was absolutely ideal for me.

bo0tzz 8y ago

I've been looking for a service like this for a while, and the first I find out about it is that it's shutting down. Does anyone know of similar offerings that are as simple? I know AWS, GCP and the likes offer container clusters, but I would like to just run a single container (for cheap) and not worry about it.

kasia66 8y ago
This is a short overview of Kubernetes and major cloud providers offering (AWS ECS, EKS, Fargate, Azure AKS, GKE, and DigitalOcean) https://blog.cloud66.com/public-cloud-managed-kubernetes-our-hands-on-experience/ https://blog.cloud66.com/public-cloud-managed-kubernetes-our...
NathanKP 8y ago
AWS employee here: I'm going to be honest AWS Fargate isn't as easy to use as hyper.sh if you are looking for an alternative. That said our increased complexity is because Fargate is orders of magnitude more full featured for applications that outgrow small platforms. If you want to give Fargate a try I'd recommend this open source tool (http://somanymachines.com/fargate/ http://somanymachines.com/fargate/) as it provides you with an easy, opinionated starter command line experience similar to what you might have seen for hyper.sh
jimmcslim 8y ago
Azure App Service's 'Web App for Containers' [1] allows you to run a container, but might not meet your definition of cheap. Also consider Azure Container Instances [2] [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/app-service/containers/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/app-service/conta... [2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/container-instances/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/container-instanc...
thesandlord 8y ago
GCP Employee here. You can run a container on a f1-micro VM for free forever: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/deploying-containers#deploying_a_container_on_a_new_vm_instance https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/deploying-c... If you want something more similar to Hyper.sh, serverless containers are coming out publicly soon, and you can sign up for the alpha here: https://g.co/serverlesscontainers https://g.co/serverlesscontainers

deforciant 8y ago

I used Hyper.sh for my side project 2 years ago during the initial development phase. It was really easy to start with but I wouldn't say it was stable. Every month or so there would be downtimes or the container would run but for example networks wouldn't work. Or storage volumes wouldn't mount/unmount.. :) After several downtimes I switched to Google's GKE and never looked back. Hyper is easy to start with but impossible to finish. There was no managed database at that time (not sure whether they had it now) and using Postgres with their persistent volumes (which are backed by Ceph I think) performance was really sad. All in all, it was a great service for trying out ideas or running small & less important applications, but if you really want it to always be available, then probably it's not the right tool.

whoisjuan 8y ago

Just found out about this service. It looks like a solid concept. Any alternatives out there?

charlieegan3 8y ago

They had a cron feature which was really good. I've switched to running a Kubernetes cluster for my side projects but Hyper.sh cron was really easy to get started with.

smarterclayton 8y ago
Any specific areas for Kubernetes to focus on?
- charlieegan3 8y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. As in, is there something k8s might do better with its CronJob feature? I don't think so no... If you just wanted to run a container on a schedule, and you didn't have a cluster running already, Hyper sh was a lower bar to do that. If you do have a cluster, using a CronJob on said cluster is easier for me than maintaining something on Hyper sh... I might have missed the question...

tonicbbleking 8y ago

Zeit is dropping the support for containers for their v2 and now Hyper is shutting down their services. Any other one sentence deploy ("now" or "hyper run") for containers available out there?

friedman23 8y ago
App engine is really nice, it's `gcloud app deploy` and they have support for multistage deploys. I had to drop them because it's hard to start a HIPAA compliant product on their platform as a solo dev. AWS on the other hand signs a BAA with you with the click a button. This forced me to learn AWS and to learn that all I really need for the MVP is a single EC2 instance, RDS, a redis subscription from redis labs, and cloud watch. Deploying is just pulling from github, shutting down the service and restarting it. It doesn't really need to be simpler than that. I'm pretty sure that I could scale to 10k users per day on 1 ec2 instance and by that point I would hopefully have venture capital and hire an expert to handle all this for me.

vertis 8y ago

This really sucks for those that have invested in the platform and now have less than a month of warning. If anyone needs help migrating off hyper.sh I am pretty free over the holiday period. I have extensive DevOps experience. I'm happy to help (gratis). My email is on my profile.

Walkman 8y ago

It's a shame. It was one of the most innovative cloud provider and my personal favourite.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ahallock 8y ago

I was planning on using this for my side project. I thought it looked great for MVPs and small projects. What happened?

cpursley 8y ago

Wow, a two week notice for an infrastructure provider is borderline criminal. I'm out for the holiday during this period... Guess it's going to be a scramble to get back on reliable 'ole Heroku for me. What a nightmare.

ksajadi 8y ago

Over the past 5 years I’ve seen too mans PaaS provider shutdown. Every time those affected ask why and my answer is the same: PaaS is a great tool but an awful business. We studied many PaaS providers and their business model and I believe there are fundamental business issues with a PaaS provider that provides infrastructure as well as the platform. The only way to survive the market is to have a rich owner (like Heroku / Salesforce), be a cloud provider (GoogleApps), run it yourself (DIY Kubernetes like solutions) or use a service that manages a PaaS on your own servers (Cloud 66).

revskill 8y ago

What is hyper.sh ?

petercooper 8y ago

I note that their Twitter account has had no activity for a few months. This seems to be a common thing with services that shut down or products that get discontinued. Makes me wonder.. maybe it's worth building a tool that monitors the Twitter accounts of common services and products and raises a bat signal if they don't tweet for a month or two. It seems to be where budget gets tightened first.

XorNot 8y ago

Interesting to see one of these happen. Put me down for this happening to Mongo's Stitch product next.

0xbkt 8y ago

In fact, I felt this coming since quite a long time. One day, they abrubtly shut down their Pi (serverless K8s) without a notification. Their forum was deserted. A little activity in Slack. Nothing but these.