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Congrats on the launch. Looks interesting. Quick thoughts on the landing page: - Pricing looks awesome. - I'm not currently the target audience because everyt

by rgbrgb 3y ago

Congrats on the launch. Looks interesting. Quick thoughts on the landing page: - Pricing looks awesome. - I'm not currently the target audience because everything I'm doing right now is open source with free GitHub actions. - I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. - Visual nit: lacking horizontal padding from 990px to ~1200px, a common window size on my 14" MBP. > Ubicloud is an open source cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems. You can self-host Ubicloud or use our managed service. I find this hard to parse and the first few times I thought you were saying it's a linux alternative. I just clicked to the docs and the "What is Ubicloud?" section is clearer because you say concretely and directly what it is rather than how I should think of it metaphorically: "infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) features on providers that lease bare metal instances, such as Hetzner, OVH, and AWS Bare Metal. It’s also available as a managed service." There's some old "counterintuitive" adage I'm too lazy to look up about how the best marketing to engineers is just saying in concrete language what it is rather than the benefit it provides. In this case, I'd do both: tell me what it actually is and why that makes it cheaper/better. Also a minor note, there's a typo in that paragraph (missing space "systems.Ubicloud").

Arelius 3y ago
> I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. So, while this is the first time I've heard of ubicloud, I use gha extensively. Abd frankly, I think it's just because Github has a crazy markup on their actions compute over the raw compute. Taking a quick look, it appears that their base rate is like $0.008 per-minute!! That's a rate that wouldn't look crazy out of line with EC2's hourly rate. I've worked on projects where we saved significant money, and improved build times just by launching a single EC2 instance and connecting it to Actions.
- pinkgolem 3y ago
  Iops on GitHub runners is also terrible slow, you easily get a 5x to 10x improvement We did the same, and set up GitHub actions runners on hetzner Halfed the integration test time and made them more reliable.
  - password4321 3y ago
    I've heard CI/CD in general and GitHub Actions specifically is where old cloud hardware goes until it dies.
  - crohr 3y ago
    Just a catch with Hetzner vs AWS: pricing at AWS is per-second while Hetzner is per-hour, which is (very) inconvenient if you're launching ephemeral runners.
    - pinkgolem 3y ago
      while thats true.. i am using TestFlows-GitHub-Hetzner-Runners, which recycles runner for the 1 hour lifetime, works like a charm so far also main reason for switching was performance, not cost for us.
robertlagrant 3y ago
If we're doing nits, because this product looks cool, here are a couple of potential tweaks: > Imagine to do more I'd get rid of this. I don't understand the phrase, and it sounds like fluff. > Fast runs even at this price point I'd get rid of the "point". "Price point" isn't a synonym for "price", which I think is what's being attempted here. I'd be tempted to just have no tagline, and retitle this section "Faster than GitHub Actions". You've already said it's cheaper. > Ubicloud is an open, free, and portable cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems. You can check out our source code in GitHub or see Ubicloud runners in action for our GitHub Actions. An open and portable cloud gives you the option to manage your own VMs and runners, should you choose to. This is woolly. How about: Ubicloud is an open and free cloud. You can run it on the hosting provider of your choice, or bring your own hardware. Check out our source code on GitHub!
- kpandit 3y ago
  Nitpicking is contagious. Once one does it, then immediately others feel compelled to do it too, me included... Their pricing page looks amazing. Not because of any funky UI stuff but because of the slight displacement of the decimal point.
- umur 3y ago
  Much appreciate the nits! I've made a few minor tweaks right now, we will do a more complete revision later on.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    > Fast runs even at this price what about: 'Cheaper doesn't mean slower'? It's pithier, and (in particular for anyone reading before/without looking at the page) better IMO in its place as a subheading. Scans better. Or even 'Cheaper != slower' (again, subhead).
asveikau 3y ago
> I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. I don't think it's very expensive to run a build server.
- kpandit 3y ago
  Not until it works. But when it doesn't you have an office full of people waiting for someone to fix that broken build server. In terms of lost productivity this disaster is very expensive. Over the years I have suffered only three hardware disasters. One was a NAS+backup screwup but other two were both related to build servers...
  - asveikau 3y ago
    This reminds me. It must have been 2009ish. I was at Microsoft. Part of the code I was responsible for ran on the Windows build servers. This code was triggering a kernel bug in the Windows registry. The only way I knew how to reproduce it was by building Windows. Because thousands of Windows builds happened per day, maybe 1 of them would hit it every 1-3 days. The way I got it in a kernel debugger was to constantly run the problematic race condition inside a VM, when it detected that it hadn't hit, it would roll back the VM to a save state of the code already running in progress ... Took an overnight run to hit it on a machine in the office. All that said, I'd still say it's not very expensive to run a build machine.
umur 3y ago
Thank you for your feedback! I've just made several edits to the text for clarity; will also fix UX bugs and do bigger a update in the upcoming weeks.
- rgbrgb 3y ago
  big improvement! good luck

by rgbrgb 3y ago

Arelius 3y ago

> I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. So, while this is the first time I've heard of ubicloud, I use gha extensively. Abd frankly, I think it's just because Github has a crazy markup on their actions compute over the raw compute. Taking a quick look, it appears that their base rate is like $0.008 per-minute!! That's a rate that wouldn't look crazy out of line with EC2's hourly rate. I've worked on projects where we saved significant money, and improved build times just by launching a single EC2 instance and connecting it to Actions.

pinkgolem 3y ago
Iops on GitHub runners is also terrible slow, you easily get a 5x to 10x improvement We did the same, and set up GitHub actions runners on hetzner Halfed the integration test time and made them more reliable.
- password4321 3y ago
  I've heard CI/CD in general and GitHub Actions specifically is where old cloud hardware goes until it dies.
- crohr 3y ago
  Just a catch with Hetzner vs AWS: pricing at AWS is per-second while Hetzner is per-hour, which is (very) inconvenient if you're launching ephemeral runners.
  - pinkgolem 3y ago
    while thats true.. i am using TestFlows-GitHub-Hetzner-Runners, which recycles runner for the 1 hour lifetime, works like a charm so far also main reason for switching was performance, not cost for us.

robertlagrant 3y ago

If we're doing nits, because this product looks cool, here are a couple of potential tweaks: > Imagine to do more I'd get rid of this. I don't understand the phrase, and it sounds like fluff. > Fast runs even at this price point I'd get rid of the "point". "Price point" isn't a synonym for "price", which I think is what's being attempted here. I'd be tempted to just have no tagline, and retitle this section "Faster than GitHub Actions". You've already said it's cheaper. > Ubicloud is an open, free, and portable cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems. You can check out our source code in GitHub or see Ubicloud runners in action for our GitHub Actions. An open and portable cloud gives you the option to manage your own VMs and runners, should you choose to. This is woolly. How about: Ubicloud is an open and free cloud. You can run it on the hosting provider of your choice, or bring your own hardware. Check out our source code on GitHub!

kpandit 3y ago
Nitpicking is contagious. Once one does it, then immediately others feel compelled to do it too, me included... Their pricing page looks amazing. Not because of any funky UI stuff but because of the slight displacement of the decimal point.
umur 3y ago
Much appreciate the nits! I've made a few minor tweaks right now, we will do a more complete revision later on.
- OJFord 3y ago
  > Fast runs even at this price what about: 'Cheaper doesn't mean slower'? It's pithier, and (in particular for anyone reading before/without looking at the page) better IMO in its place as a subheading. Scans better. Or even 'Cheaper != slower' (again, subhead).

asveikau 3y ago

> I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster. I don't think it's very expensive to run a build server.

kpandit 3y ago
Not until it works. But when it doesn't you have an office full of people waiting for someone to fix that broken build server. In terms of lost productivity this disaster is very expensive. Over the years I have suffered only three hardware disasters. One was a NAS+backup screwup but other two were both related to build servers...
- asveikau 3y ago
  This reminds me. It must have been 2009ish. I was at Microsoft. Part of the code I was responsible for ran on the Windows build servers. This code was triggering a kernel bug in the Windows registry. The only way I knew how to reproduce it was by building Windows. Because thousands of Windows builds happened per day, maybe 1 of them would hit it every 1-3 days. The way I got it in a kernel debugger was to constantly run the problematic race condition inside a VM, when it detected that it hadn't hit, it would roll back the VM to a save state of the code already running in progress ... Took an overnight run to hit it on a machine in the office. All that said, I'd still say it's not very expensive to run a build machine.

umur 3y ago

Thank you for your feedback! I've just made several edits to the text for clarity; will also fix UX bugs and do bigger a update in the upcoming weeks.

rgbrgb 3y ago
big improvement! good luck