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Hey HN, We recently finished our firecracker-based webapp hosting platform. It's like if Vercel and Docker had a baby: You write VM configurations in a langua
by colinchartier 4y ago
Hey HN,
We recently finished our firecracker-based webapp hosting platform.
It's like if Vercel and Docker had a baby: You write VM configurations in a language that looks like a Dockerfile, and every commit creates a preview environment which can be "promoted" to a production site.
Here's an example configuration:
```
FROM vm/ubuntu:18.04
RUN curl -fSsL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash
RUN apt-get install nodejs
COPY . .
RUN npm install
RUN npm run build
RUN BACKGROUND npm run start
EXPOSE WEBSITE localhost:3000
```
This product combines our firecracker-based hypervisor (200ms cold starts) with a global CDN written in Go (using Caddy for TLS termination)
We can offer everything for free because we charge for the DevOps side (CI/CD & preview environments) - we have no intention of getting users and then upselling people for hosting.
We're obviously very excited about this launch, and would love to hear your feedback.
- sosodev 4y agoWhat are the limitations of the free hosting? Surely I can’t deploy once and scale infinitely without paying you, right?
- colinchartier 4y agoIt's two environments per unique account - though you can email support to prove you're a real person and get this moved up. We haven't had to formalize any policies, but they'll be similar to other cloud free tiers: - HTTP only (no terabytes of videos or images exclusively) - No crypto mining - No phishing sites - No sending emails, attacking others, etc We currently do about a million builds a year, so 99% of projects shouldn't cause problems for us.
- re-thc 4y agoVercel aka Zeit originally hosted Docker containers.
- colinchartier 4y agoWe don't actually host docker containers - the configuration DSL is based on Docker, but has crucial differences In particular, you can do things like RUN BACKGROUND docker-compose up EXPOSE WEBSITE 8080 This is super important for most use-cases, since otherwise you have to deal with networking and version control.
- nextaccountic 4y ago> You write VM configurations in a language that looks like a Dockerfile What are the differences from a Dockerfile?
- benatkin 4y agoServerless isn't that enjoyable for me since I don't like using old versions of stuff. Vercel doesn't support Node 19, which means you can't use built-in fetch without it logging a warning about fetch being experimental every time you call it. IIRC it took a long time for Node 18 to be available. Containers FTW. You can use things in production when the maintainers release to production, not when AWS Lambda has them.
- saurik 4y ago> You can use things in production when the maintainers release to production, not when AWS Lambda has them. You can run anything the hell you want in AWS Lambda as it is literally just a container. The documentation even shows you how to write your lambda function entirely in a handful of lines of bash using curl to request the job and submit the result.