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Ask HN: Instant VMs?
I'm looking for a service that gives you a VM you can SSH into with 1 click.
Think Digital Ocean, except even faster (no login), and they are ephemeral (destroyed after 60 minutes or so if you don't upgrade it to paid).
When I was at Microsoft we prototyped this idea (called it "Azure Instant"), but years later still looks like it hasn't seen the light of day.
Someone must have made this by now, right?
- bartvk 6y agoDoesn’t DO offer an API?
- breck 6y agoYes and I could build this, but would prefer to pay for someone who already built it.
- smoldesu 6y agoBe more specific? Are you asking for a virtual machine or a VPS? Local or remote?
- breck 6y agoI'd like to have a 1 click "InstantVM" button on my GitHub repos so that anyone could instantly launch a Digital Ocean droplet from a premade Ubuntu image that has the dev dependencies installed and they can immediately SSH into it. Another way to describe it is: instant and infinite development machines for open source projects that you could pull out and throw away as cheaply as tissues. You click the button, you get an IP address and password and login as root. All the code and dependencies are installed. The target user would be someone who wants to play with a project, but is weary of installing it on their local machine, or perhaps they are on windows and there's problems. The second target user is someone who wants to contribute code to a project but doesnt want to setup a local dev environment. The third target user is just the normal dev who wants to try what it feels like to use their software with a fresh install. Perhaps the user could add their credit card info to upgrade an ephemeral instance into a persistent one if they want. It should be instant, so a project can have a queue of VMs on standby ready to assign immediately. You could use the Digital Ocean API to keep the queue primed. The open source project could have a small budget (say $15/month to always keep 3 available on average). You could maybe adjust the # of free VMs in the pool via a simple backend either interace or API url. Bonus points if it could also launch VMs on Azure, AWS, and/or Google Cloud.
- dataminded 6y agoClosest thing that I'm aware of is Google Colab and Repl.it
- breck 6y agoAhh maybe repl.it could do this! Hadn't checked. Thanks for the idea!
- nwotnagrom 6y agoMay not be exactly what you are looking for but Shells.com offers VMs with pre-installed OSs as well as the option to bring in your own image if you want.
- breck 6y agoThis looks neat! Thanks!
- emmanueloga_ 6y agoThis article about hosting firecracker on digitalocean comes to mind [1], although definitely not a service, but perhaps you may be able to glue together a similar solution that does exactly what you want? 1: https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/01/23/firecracker--start-a-vm-in-less-than-a-second/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/01/23/firecracker--start-a-vm-in-l...
- breck 6y agoVery cool! Had not seen Firecrack before. Thanks for the lead.