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I used to run a site that compares prices[0]. Not only is the ecosystem pull to the cloud strong, but many developers today look at bare metal as downright daun

by oDot 7mo ago

I used to run a site that compares prices[0]. Not only is the ecosystem pull to the cloud strong, but many developers today look at bare metal as downright daunting. Not sure where that fear comes from. Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones. [0]: https://baremetalsavings.com/ https://baremetalsavings.com/

keepamovin 7mo ago
The fragmentation and friction! Comparing prices usually requires 10 open browser tabs and a spreadsheet, which is what keeps people locked into their default cloud. I built a tool to solve this called BlueDot (ie, Earth, where all the clouds are)[0]. It’s a TUI that aggregates 58,000+ server configurations across 6 clouds (including Hetzner). It lets you view side-by-side price comparisons and deploy instantly from the terminal. It makes grabbing a cheap Hetzner box just as easy as spinning up something on AWS/GCP. [0]: https://tui.bluedot.ink https://tui.bluedot.ink
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  I use serververify which is created by jbiloh from the lowendtalk forum which uses yabs (yet-another-benchmark-script) to give details about lot more things than usually meets the eye. That being said, I have found getdeploying.com to be a decent starting point as well if you aren't too well versed within the Lowend providers who are quite diverse and that comes at both costs and profits. Btw legendary https://vpspricetracker.com https://vpspricetracker.com (which was one of the first websites that I personally had opened to find vps prices when I was starting out or was curious) is also created by jbiloh. So these few websites + casually scrolling LET is enough for me to nowadays find the winner with infinitely more customizability but I understand the point of TUI but actually the whole hosting industry has always revolved around websites even from the start. So they are less interested in making TUI's for such projects generally speaking atleast that's my opinion
  - keepamovin 7mo ago
    Thanks! A planned next iteration is to include more non-mainstream cheap providers in the TUI. But that's not as simple as the current model which wraps official CLIs, as these alt providers typically don't have CLIs and diverse listing and control surfaces.
hamandcheese 7mo ago
> Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones. Big +1 to this. For what I thought was a modest sized project it feels like an np-hard problem coordinating with gcloud account reps to figure out what regions have both enough hyperdisk capacity and compute capacity. A far cry from being able to just "download more ram" with ease. The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers. (All that said... still way easier than if I needed to procure our own hardware and colocate it. The project is complete. Just delayed more than I expected.)
- hvb2 7mo ago
  > The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers. The cloud is where the entire responsibility for those servers lives elsewhere. If you're going to run a VM, sure. But when you're running a managed db with some managed compute, the cost for that might be high in comparison. But you just offloaded the whole infra management responsibility. That's their value add
  - stephenr 7mo ago
    But any serious deployment of "cloud" infrastructure still needs management, you're just forcing the people doing it to use the small number of knobs the cloud provider makes available rather than giving them full access to the software itself.
    - hvb2 7mo ago
      not sure what you mean by a serious deployment, but a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms. Will that be more expensive than running it yourself? Absolutely. Does it allow teams to function and deliver independently, yes. As an org, you can prioritize cost or something else.
      - stephenr 7mo ago
        > a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms. Right, and who or what causes those services to be provisioned, to be configured, etc.?
satvikpendem 7mo ago
> Not sure where that fear comes from. Probably because most developers these days have not known a world without using cloud providers, with AWS being 20 years old now.
- jmathai 7mo ago
  Racking your own hardware doesn’t get you web UIs and APIs out of the box. At least it didn’t 2 decades ago.
  - satvikpendem 7mo ago
    Sure, now it does however (via the many OSS PaaS) so the calculus must also therefore change.
    - spockz 7mo ago
      Which OSS PaaS are there that are noteworthy? Or do you mean something like Kubernetes?
      - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
        Coolify is usually loved by the community. Dokploy is another good one. Kubero seems nice for more kubernetes oriented tasks. But I feel like if someone is having a single piece of hardware as the OP did. Kubernetes might not be of as much help and Coolify/Dokploy are so much simpler in that regards.
        spockz 7mo ago
        Thanks. I will look into those. I suppose kubernetes with the right operators installed and the right node labels applied could almost work as a self service control plane. But then VMs have to run in kubevirt. There is crossplane but that needs another IaaS to do its thing.
jbverschoor 7mo ago
Partitioning a server! Omg lol It’s funny, bc AWS did not start this tour of business. What they did do is make it possible to pay by the hour. The ephemeral spare compute is what they started. Yet almost nobody understood the ephemeral part. You might even be better off running a macmini at home fiber, especially for backend processing

by oDot 7mo ago

keepamovin 7mo ago

The fragmentation and friction! Comparing prices usually requires 10 open browser tabs and a spreadsheet, which is what keeps people locked into their default cloud. I built a tool to solve this called BlueDot (ie, Earth, where all the clouds are)[0]. It’s a TUI that aggregates 58,000+ server configurations across 6 clouds (including Hetzner). It lets you view side-by-side price comparisons and deploy instantly from the terminal. It makes grabbing a cheap Hetzner box just as easy as spinning up something on AWS/GCP. [0]: https://tui.bluedot.ink https://tui.bluedot.ink

Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
I use serververify which is created by jbiloh from the lowendtalk forum which uses yabs (yet-another-benchmark-script) to give details about lot more things than usually meets the eye. That being said, I have found getdeploying.com to be a decent starting point as well if you aren't too well versed within the Lowend providers who are quite diverse and that comes at both costs and profits. Btw legendary https://vpspricetracker.com https://vpspricetracker.com (which was one of the first websites that I personally had opened to find vps prices when I was starting out or was curious) is also created by jbiloh. So these few websites + casually scrolling LET is enough for me to nowadays find the winner with infinitely more customizability but I understand the point of TUI but actually the whole hosting industry has always revolved around websites even from the start. So they are less interested in making TUI's for such projects generally speaking atleast that's my opinion
- keepamovin 7mo ago
  Thanks! A planned next iteration is to include more non-mainstream cheap providers in the TUI. But that's not as simple as the current model which wraps official CLIs, as these alt providers typically don't have CLIs and diverse listing and control surfaces.

hamandcheese 7mo ago

> Cloud challenges can be as or more complex than bare metal ones. Big +1 to this. For what I thought was a modest sized project it feels like an np-hard problem coordinating with gcloud account reps to figure out what regions have both enough hyperdisk capacity and compute capacity. A far cry from being able to just "download more ram" with ease. The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers. (All that said... still way easier than if I needed to procure our own hardware and colocate it. The project is complete. Just delayed more than I expected.)

hvb2 7mo ago
> The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers. The cloud is where the entire responsibility for those servers lives elsewhere. If you're going to run a VM, sure. But when you're running a managed db with some managed compute, the cost for that might be high in comparison. But you just offloaded the whole infra management responsibility. That's their value add
- stephenr 7mo ago
  But any serious deployment of "cloud" infrastructure still needs management, you're just forcing the people doing it to use the small number of knobs the cloud provider makes available rather than giving them full access to the software itself.
  - hvb2 7mo ago
    not sure what you mean by a serious deployment, but a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms. Will that be more expensive than running it yourself? Absolutely. Does it allow teams to function and deliver independently, yes. As an org, you can prioritize cost or something else.
    - stephenr 7mo ago
      > a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms. Right, and who or what causes those services to be provisioned, to be configured, etc.?

satvikpendem 7mo ago

> Not sure where that fear comes from. Probably because most developers these days have not known a world without using cloud providers, with AWS being 20 years old now.

jmathai 7mo ago
Racking your own hardware doesn’t get you web UIs and APIs out of the box. At least it didn’t 2 decades ago.
- satvikpendem 7mo ago
  Sure, now it does however (via the many OSS PaaS) so the calculus must also therefore change.
  - spockz 7mo ago
    Which OSS PaaS are there that are noteworthy? Or do you mean something like Kubernetes?
    - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
      Coolify is usually loved by the community. Dokploy is another good one. Kubero seems nice for more kubernetes oriented tasks. But I feel like if someone is having a single piece of hardware as the OP did. Kubernetes might not be of as much help and Coolify/Dokploy are so much simpler in that regards.
      - spockz 7mo ago
        Thanks. I will look into those. I suppose kubernetes with the right operators installed and the right node labels applied could almost work as a self service control plane. But then VMs have to run in kubevirt. There is crossplane but that needs another IaaS to do its thing.

jbverschoor 7mo ago

Partitioning a server! Omg lol It’s funny, bc AWS did not start this tour of business. What they did do is make it possible to pay by the hour. The ephemeral spare compute is what they started. Yet almost nobody understood the ephemeral part. You might even be better off running a macmini at home fiber, especially for backend processing