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Show HN: Burst – start a cloud server, run your code, turn it off
- danbmil99 5y agoHi, Dan and Genevieve from burstable.ai here. We created a tool called burst to make on-demand cloud compute easy. This lets developers access powerful machines for CPU- and GPU-intensive tasks, with minimal devops overhead. Using our burst CLI, you can provision a cloud VM (or restart an existing one), sync your code and data, run the task, re-sync the data back, and have the VM stop automatically once the task is done. We've also added support for running JupyterLab in the cloud, with automatic timeout so you don't accidentally leave expensive machines running overnight (or worse). burst is an open-source project with a permissive licensing model. We do intend to build a PaaS business leveraging burst (the so-called "open core" business model). However, we are committed to the development of burst itself as a viable FOSS project. Our vision is to make simple cloud devops as transparent as possible for data scientists, ML / AI researchers and the like. With the support of users and contributors, this vision can extend to other domains such as 3D production, video analytics and more. One of our beta testers, an Astrophysicist/Data Scientist, put it succinctly: when it comes to devops "I treasure my ignorance". Developers who are not pursuing an IT/devops career should have an easy way to provision compute resources---one that is predictable, and consistent across platforms. burst is our first step toward that vision. We’re excited to share it with you.
- JZL003 5y agoSeems pretty similar to a couple of things, not least terra (although that is nominally more biology focused). Where terra allows setting up pipelines for data as well
- danbmil99 5y agoI'm having trouble finding the product you mentioned. Can you post a link?
- 708733454927516 5y agohere are a couple: https://app.terra.bio/ https://app.terra.bio/ https://support.terra.bio/hc/en-us https://support.terra.bio/hc/en-us
- yewenjie 5y agoThis is cool but looks like it is Python specific. Is there a similar service out there for arbitrary languages?
- danbmil99 5y agoGreat question. Initially we have focused on the Python ecosystem but we certainly don't want to stop there. Jupyterlab (which we have integrated support for) claims to support 100+ languages. While our infrastructure code is written in Python, we present a CLI which is language-agnostic. We depend on Docker to virtualize the environment, but again that is not tied to Python. If somebody wants to do some coding and testing of non-Python languages, we would certainly support the effort as best we can.
- spiritplumber 5y agocolor me ignorant, but I thought that this is how cloud servers worked in the first place... now it seems to me that I can use one. so thank you!
- flatline 5y agoYou typically get a dedicated VM that can scale its compute resources on demand. Or have to program something serverless.
- verdverm 5y agoAll of the major clouds have stop/start for this same purpose. It is left as an exercise for the user to trigger and run a command based on work completion.
- nostrebored 5y agoBeyond that they have dedicated service offerings for this kind of compute. Severless, managed service to execute specific framework, etc. Like I don't see how this is anything less than a feature-light sagemaker notebook.
- robbiemitchell 5y agoYou have to shut them down manually. A company cannot trust all users to do this perfectly.
- DonHopkins 5y agoI use burst with google cloud, and it works great! I especially like the new Jupyter support -- I can actually run emacs in a shell window in the docker container via a Jupyter notebook in the browser, and it works just fine! Maybe it's a bad habit and breaks the rules of encapsulation, but it sure makes it easy to go in there in the first person, to see what's installed, to look at the input and output and log files, to diagnose what's going wrong, and to hack and debug it with emacs the "old school way", which is a lot easier for me than the typical "hands off" approach to docker development. It's expensive to rent the big GPUs, so it's useful to go in there and interactively hack the code in real time while it's still running, instead of waiting for yet another docker container rebuild for a tiny little tweak. Then burst syncs my changes back. It also saves money to shut off the server when it's not being used.
- enriquto 5y ago> run emacs in a shell window in the docker container via a Jupyter notebook in the browser I don't know if I'm more disgusted by this unholy accumulation of complexity, or amazed that it actually works well. In any case, we live in awesome times.
- indigodaddy 5y agoIs there a free tier, preferably with some GPU access..? (grin grin, I know this is a highly optimistic question)
- indigodaddy 5y agoIt appears I misunderstood the service. This isn't actually a cloud service, these are tools to facilitate the use of your own cloud services it appears..
- danbmil99 5y agoPlease send an email to beta at burstable.ai And anyone else who's interested please contact us
- bravura 5y agoHow does this compare to https://spotty.cloud https://spotty.cloud ? That's a very convenient open-source tool for provisioning (spot and reserved) instances, and syncing your data to and from it.
- danbmil99 5y agoThanks for the tip, this one hadn't crossed our radar
- syntaxing 5y agoThis is really awesome. When I was younger, I accidentally kept a gpu AWS instance on for a week or two and racked up $1K+ bill (which Amazon thankfully forgave). Been kinda traumatized and haven’t used any cloud related service since then for personal projects. This might make me try it out again!
- poopypoopington 5y agoSame! Did it with Amazon and they forgive a $200 debt (gotta say something for amazing customer service), did it with Google and they would not forgive a much smaller $40 debt (also gotta say something for terrible customer service I suppose). Will probably turn to AWS and certainly not Google again if I ever need the cloud.
- elygre 5y agoI’m surprised that you expect to not pay for the service you use. I checked into a hotel yesterday, and will check out this morning. I don’t consider it bad customer service that they want to get paid for that room.
- Enhex 5y agothese cloud services intentionally try to get you to make such spending mistakes by not providing an option to set a budget or time limit, or auto shutdown on idle. i assume AWS learned to target businesses with this shady strategy, which do waste huge amounts of money this way, instead of burning bridges with hobbyist developers over pennies that later will avoid using AWS at the workplace if given the choice.
- Closi 5y ago> I checked into a hotel yesterday, and will check out this morning. I don’t consider it bad customer service that they want to get paid for that room. What if you forgot to check out, and the hotel kept charging you for the room until you got a bill at the end of the month? (ie you got a bill for 20 nights). I know that’s not how hotels work, but it’s how these cloud services work.
- mjaques 5y agoThis is very similar to https://nimbo.sh https://nimbo.sh, which is also an open core project.
- graderjs 5y agoName is pretty good. But I suggest "cloudburst" -- both for the rain association, the obvious overlap with your business, and (I think) in some Asian languages it's associated or with or a euphemism for orgasm.
- mongol 5y agoSpeaking of which, I have never heard of a product or service called orgasm.
- DonHopkins 5y agoWebasm? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25291861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25291861
- nerdponx 5y agoI saw a makeup brand called Orgasm at Sephora not long ago.
- kryptiskt 5y agoIf org-mode ever needs a low-level IR they know what they should name it.
- aitchnyu 5y agoOrkut was a very popular social network named after its Finnish founder and reports vary from its THE word for orgasm to its a colloquial word.
- graderjs 5y agoHaha, well that might be too obvious a reference? Stepping on people's taboos or prudishness? Some euphemism can be helpful :) You know, it's like association with something that is positive, a peak experience, as well as connoting maybe something a little fun and naughty, but nevertheless something we all share. Like poop, but with a good valence.
- ainzzorl 5y agoPlease consider adding an FAQ about how it compares to "native" AWS offerings, because it resembles a few of them. E.g. Lambda ("run your code" without "start a cloud server" and "turn it off"), ECS (runs containers, can run a standalone task too), Fargate, Batch... The "running JupyterLab in the cloud, with automatic timeout" use case is supported by AWS Sagemaker. Disclaimer: I'm a former AWS employee.
- blensor 5y agoLambda has currently a limit of 15 minutes as far as I can remember. I was considering it for a very cost efficient way to scale our multiplayer backend in VRWorkout (dynamically spin up room servers as needed) since it all fits in a single python module. But with the 15 minute limit it's not an option. I would not even need data syncing since it talks to the main server and does not have state. But it would need to be reachable on a public IP
- ainzzorl 5y agoLambda indeed is not the right tool for this. It sounds like you need some infra that can auto scale - there are many ways to do it on AWS (EC2 auto scaling, ECS, EKS), any other cloud provider, with Kubernetes...
- blensor 5y agoyes, probably, but then we are back where I need to put a lot more effort into it than I wanted to at this stage. I really only need to cover burst usage since an average VRWorkout session is only ~10-20 minutes anyway and with players being distributed around the world there is usually no need to boost the available resources. That's a problem I would like to have down the road when we have millions of people doing VR fitness though :)
- Too 5y agoI find the documentation to be missing a short overview of the architecture or the conceptual model. It only has step-by-step instructions, and it's not entirely clear what really happens underneath each command. I can guess it is building docker images and sending them to the VM but i'm not really sure if and when that happens. Looks convenient otherwise.
- akdor1154 5y agoThis is awesome, I have been searching for a tool like this as recently as a couple of months and have been baffled to always come up empty. Thankyou and good luck!
- doctoboggan 5y agoAt my previous startup I often had to spin up high powered Windows machines for the MechEs to run their solidworks simulations. It was always a hassle and they never remembered to turn them off when they were done. IIRC they cost about $30/hour and that adds up if you forget and leave it running over the weekend. I would have definitely used a service like yours if it supported solidworks simulations. Especially if it auto timed out.
- RyEgswuCsn 5y agoThis is pretty neat. I saw that Docker is required on the local side; what's that for? (My understanding is that it sets up Docker on the remote server and build the container using the project's Dockerfile.)
- oenetan 5y agoOh look, miller from on2 (vp9) fame. Anything from miller is great and unique, i recommend you check it out
- swordbeta 5y agoPage returns a 500 when there are query strings present: https://burstable.ai/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=show_hn https://burstable.ai/?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium...
- danbmil99 5y agoThanks for pointing this out. Is it considered standard practice for websites to ignore unrecognized query parameters? Disclaimer: I'm not a front-end engineer; we put the site up in a bit of a hurry, using the framework I usually use for REST API's, where typically you want to error out if given unknown query strings.