24 ms·

I am building a cloud

• stingraycharles 5mo ago
  Potentially useful context: OP is one of the cofounders of Tailscale. > Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack. I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go: start with great ideals, but as success grows, so must profit. Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Some services they lose money on, others they profit heavily from. These things are often carefully chosen: the type of costs that only go up when customers are heavily committed—bandwidth, NAT gateway, etc. But I'm fairly certain OP knows this.
  • sroussey 5mo ago
    Many cloud vendors have you pay through the nose for IOPS and bandwidth. Edit: I posted this before reading, and these two are the same he points out.
    • stingraycharles 5mo ago
      Yes, but you can’t directly compare SAN-style storage with a local NVMe. But I agree that it’s too expensive, but not nearly as insane as the bandwidth pricing. If you go to a vendor and ask for a petabyte of storage, and it needs to be fully redundant, and you need the ability to take PIT-consistent multi-volume snapshots, be ready to pay up. And this is what’s being offered here. And yes, IO typically happens in 4kb blocks, so you need a decent amount of IOPS to get the full bandwidth.
      • amluto 5mo ago
        Sure, but a petabyte of block storage with redundancy and PIT backups is a poor abstraction to build on, in large part because it’s not a thing that can be built without either paying an wild amount of money or taking a huge performance hit or both. If you do your PIT recovery at a higher layer, you have to work a bit harder but you get far better cost, perf and recovery. That latter part is a big deal, too. If I buy 1PB of block storage, I’m decently likely to be running a fancy journaled or WAL-ed or rollback-logged thing on top, and that thing might be completely unable to read from a read only snapshot. So actually reading from a PIT snapshot is a pain regardless of what I paid for it. Even using EBS or similar snapshots is far from being an amazing experience.
  • faangguyindia 5mo ago
    i was just curious so i tested this actually. Using fio Hetzner (cx23, 2vCPU, 4 GB) ~3900 IOPS (read/write) ~15.3 MB/s avg latency ~2.1 ms 99.9th percentile ≈ ~5 ms max ≈ ~7 ms DigitalOcean (SFO1 / 2 GB RAM / 30 GB Disk) ~3900 IOPS (same!) ~15.7 MB/s (same!) avg latency ~2.1 ms (same!) 99.9th percentile ≈ ~18 ms max ≈ ~85 ms (!!) using sequential dd Hetzner: 1.9 GB/s DO: 850 MB/s Using low end plan on both but this Hetzner is 4 euro and DO instance is $18.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • yard2010 5mo ago
      I love Hetzner so much. I'm not affiliated I'm a really happy customer these guys just do everything right.
      • ratg13 5mo ago
        As long as you never have to interact with them. If you run into issues they have caused themselves, you'll find yourself dealing with a unique mix of arrogance and incompetence.
        • drcongo 5mo ago
          I've been using Hetzner for ~20 years and every single support interaction I've ever had with them has been top tier. Never AI bots, always humans who are helpful, courteous and prompt. I can't think of a single company, let alone hosting company, whose customer service has been so consistently good.
          • Aeolun 5mo ago
            It certainly helps the service never does anything wonky that requires a support interaction in the first place.
        • debo_ 5mo ago
  • fragmede 5mo ago
    > Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Business 101 teaches us that pricing isn't based on cost. Call it top down vs bottom up pricing, but the first principles "it costs me $X to make a widget, so 1.y * $X = sell the product for $Y is not how pricing works in practice.
    • jeffrallen 5mo ago
      Just to spell this out more clearly for the back row.of the classroom: The price is what the customer will pay, regardless of your costs.
      • barrkel 5mo ago
        Economics teaches us that a big difference between cost and price attracts competition which should make the price trend towards the cost.
        • _el1s7 5mo ago
          Exactly.
        • ncruces 5mo ago
          Only if the barrier of entry is low. Which it won't be, if at every turn you choose the hyperscaler.
        • stingraycharles 5mo ago
          If this is the case, cheap bandwidth for AWS, when?
        • dns_snek 5mo ago
          Practice taught me that that "should" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and it's often not the case, even across long time periods (years) that should allow competitors to emerge. For example I calculated the cost of a solar install to be approximately: Material + Labour + Generous overhead + Very tidy profit = 10,000€ In practice I keep getting offers for ~14,000€, which will be reduced to 10,000€ with a government subsidy and my request for an itemized invoice is always met with radio silence.
  • torginus 5mo ago
    >3000 IOPS If that's true, I wonder if this is a deliberate decision by cloud providers to push users towards microservice architectures with proprietary cloud storage like S3, so you can't do on-machine dbs even for simple servers.
    • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      It's probably a combination of high density storage nodes getting I/O bound and SSDs having finite write endurance. Anything that improves the first problem costs them money to improve it and then makes the second problem worse, and the second one costs them money again, so why would they want to make the default something that costs then more twice if most people don't need it? Instead they make the default "meager IOPS" and then charge more to the people who need more.
      • zamadatix 5mo ago
        How often is the storage in cloud providers even local vs how often are laptops doing anything other than raw access to a single local disk with a basic FS? I remember my worked laptop's IOPS beating a single VM on the first SSD based SAN I deployed as well. Of course, the SAN scaled well beyond it with 1,000 VMs.
      • torginus 5mo ago
        I'm not sure about this but I remember that a lot of servers at my old company stuck with hard disks as late as 2018 - exactly for the same reason - HDDs for all their faults dont have write endurance issues. This was quite surprising to me back then.
  • t_sawyer 5mo ago
    I've run an Openstack cloud. Local to the host NVME's directly attached to VMs is unbeatable. All clouds offer this. But that storage is ephemeral and it was when I implemented it in Openstack too. There's not enough redundancy. You could raid1 those NVME's when before they get attached to a VM and that helps with hardware failures, but you get less of them to attach. Even if you RAID them, there's not a good way to move that VM to another host if there's a RAM or CPU or other hardware issue on that host. These VM's with NVME's directly attached have to basically be treated as bare metal servers and you have to do redundancy at the application layer (like database replication). But again, all of the major cloud services offer these types of machines if you NEED NVME IO speed. There are quirks though. For example, in Azure it seems like you have to be able to expect the VM to be moved whenever Azure feels like it and expect that ephemeral data to be wiped. Whereas in Openstack, we would do local block level migrations if we HAD to move the VM to another host. That block level migration required the VM to be turned off but it did copy the local NVME data to another host. If this happened it was all planned and the particular application had app level redundancy built in so it was not a problem. If the host crashed, that particular VM would just be down till the host was fixed and came back online.
    • chatmasta 5mo ago
      > There's not enough redundancy So build resiliency into your application layer.
      • sshine 5mo ago
        You don't always choose the application layer. When you're an OpenStack cloud provider, your customers choose. When you're a customer using Open Source software, your vendors choose. Using a mixture of directly attached NVMe and network-attached volumes with backup is the sweet spot for me. I don't need to maintain my own network filesystem (Ceph), and I can put applications that mirrors its database natively on NVMe and everything I don't have much control over on network-attached volumes. I feel like there's something better not yet made.
    • solatic 5mo ago
      > Even if you RAID them, there's not a good way to move that VM to another host if there's a RAM or CPU or other hardware issue on that host. This is the critical point. All hardware fails eventually. The CPU and RAM are, in a real sense, also ephemeral. The only relevant question is what the risk tolerance of the use-case is. If restoring from async backup is sufficient, then embrace ephemerality and keep backups. If you need round-the-clock availability, pick an architecture that lets you fall over gracefully to another machine, and embrace the ephemerality when you inevitably need to do so.
• zackify 5mo ago
  That's insane funding so congrats. Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.
  • sixhobbits 5mo ago
    Investment is done by relationships, belief in a future vision and team, and growth metrics like number of paying customers. The technology itself in its current form is not valuable
    • isoprophlex 5mo ago
      Sobering comment for all the little people like myself who dream of owning a business based on a vision of cool tech that just does what it promises (as opposed to all the corporate shovelware out there)
      • dgb23 5mo ago
        You can still do that. Not every business needs to be a hyperscaling startup.
        • qudat 5mo ago
          Agreed! Over at https://pico.sh https://pico.sh we are chugging along and having a blast. Profitable but at a scale that is manageable for us. Cheers
      • crawshaw 5mo ago
        Author here. Almost every VC rejected us when we went to get seed funding for Tailscale, we knew none of them. Friends of friends of acquaintances got us meetings. Fundraising is very possible for you if you are committed to building a business. Most important thing is don't think of fundraising as the goal, it is just a tool for building a business. (And some businesses don't need VC funding to work. Some do.) The biggest challenge is personal: do you want to build a business or do you want to work with cool tech? Sometimes those goals are aligned, but usually they are not. Threading the needle and doing both is difficult, and you always have to prioritize the business because you have to make payroll.
• poly2it 5mo ago
  Why is an imperative SSH interface a better way of setting cloud resources than something like OpenTofu? In my experience humans and agents work better in declarative environments. If an OpenTofu integration is offered in the future, will exe.dev offer any value over existing cost-effective VPS providers like Hetzner? Technically, Hetzner, for example, also allows you to set up shared disk volumes: https://github.com/hetzneronline/community-content/blob/master/tutorials/mount-volume-on-multiple-servers-with-sshfs/01.en.md https://github.com/hetzneronline/community-content/blob/mast... It also has a CLI, hcloud. Am I getting any value with exe.dev I couldn't get with an 80 line hcloud wrapper?
  • ZihangZ 5mo ago
    I don't think SSH vs OpenTofu is the core issue here. For agents, declarative plans are still valuable because they are reviewable. The interesting question is whether exe.dev changes the primitive: resource pools for many isolated VM-like processes, or just nicer VPS provisioning.
    • poly2it 5mo ago
      It doesn't do either at competitive rates by the looks of it.
• st-keller 5mo ago
  Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!
  • setnone 5mo ago
    Yeah i feel like it's getting cloudy
  • anonzzzies 5mo ago
    Me too. I already moved our products to it and it is getting fairly robust. Guess many smaller companies got tired with the big guys asking a lot of money for things that should be cheap.
• ianpurton 5mo ago
  I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?
  • saltmate 5mo ago
    As I understand, a cloud provider where instead of paying for each VM (with a set of resources), you pay for the resources, and can get as many VMs as you can fit on these resources.
  • szszrk 5mo ago
    You choose a region. Then you pay for some compute size (vcpu and mem), and then you can create a lot of VMs using those limits. If some VM's don't consume all resources, others can consume it in burst. VMs have a built-in gateway to cloud providers with a fixed url with no auth. You can top that in via the service itself. No need for your own keys. So likely a good tool for managing AI agents. And "cloud" is a bit of a stretch, the service is very narrow. The complete lack of more detailed description of the regions except city name makes it really only suitable for ephemeral/temporary deployments. We don't know what the datacenters are, what redundancy is in place, no backups or anything like that.
• kjok 5mo ago
  How difficult is it to build a second startup on the side?
• faangguyindia 5mo ago
  i just use Hetzner. Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime. i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us. i don't know why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore. All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
  • kubb 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • Manfred 5mo ago
    Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.
    • Tepix 5mo ago
      I get the feeling that with LLMs in the mix, in-house server management can do a lot more than it used to.
      • tgv 5mo ago
        Perhaps it saves some time looking through the docs, but do you really trust an LLM to do the actual work?
        • windex 5mo ago
          Yes and an LLM checks it as well. I am yet to find a sysadmin task that an LLM couldn't solve neatly.
          • jdkoeck 5mo ago
• import 5mo ago
  Article doesn’t really tell what fundamental problems will be solved, except fancy VM allocation. Nothing about hardware, networking, reliability, tooling and such. Well, nice, good luck.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• z3t4 5mo ago
  You can run several VM's or containers with isolation on your phone hardware, why even use the cloud when you just want to show your friends?
  • skybrian 5mo ago
    For me it’s so my coding agent keeps running when I close my laptop lid and it goes to sleep. VM in the cloud because I’m too lazy to set up a computer to be running as a server all the time.
• vasco 5mo ago
  I know its a personal blog but the writing style is really full of himself. What a martyr, starting a second company.
  • Animats 5mo ago
    It's hard to see the scale of what he's doing. Could be: - I'm building a server farm in my homelab. - I'm doing a small startup to see if this idea works. - We're taking on AWS by being more cost effective. Funding secured.
    • cwillu 5mo ago
      Not an answer, but it this provides some illumination on the question: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/commit/d539a950ca4a668101940269139a1557cf5cbb0a https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/commit/d539a950ca4a66...
    • kennywinker 5mo ago
      If you click the first link in the post, about funding, you’ll see they just raised $35mil.
• farfatched 5mo ago
  Nice post. exe.dev is a cool service that I enjoyed. I agree there is opportunity in making LLM development flows smooth, paired with the flexibility of root-on-a-Linux-machine. > Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you. The irony is that this is my experience of Tailscale. Finally, networking made easy. Oh god, why is my battery doing so poorly. Oh god, it's modified my firewall rules in a way that's incompatible with some other tool, and the bug tracker is silent. Now I have to understand their implementation, oh dear. No thank you.
  • LoganDark 5mo ago
    I find it difficult to configure Tailscale for my use case because they seem to completely not support making ACL rules based on the identity of the device rather than a part of the address space. I'm not configuring a router here, I'm configuring a peer-to-peer networking layer... or at least I'm supposed to be...
    • spockz 5mo ago
      I remember from the docs you can use node names. At the very least you can use tags for sure. Assign tags to nodes and define the ACL based on those.
      • LoganDark 5mo ago
        Last I read the docs while troubleshooting this very problem, you cannot specify node names as the source or destination of a grant. You can specify direct IP address ranges, node groups (including autogenerated ones) or tags, but not names. Tags permanently erase the user identity from a device, and disable things like Taildrop. When I tried to assign a tag for ACLs, I found that I then could not remove it and had to endure a very laborous process to re-register a Tailscale device that I added to Tailscale for the express purpose of remotely accessing
        • ghthor 5mo ago
• 47872324 5mo ago
  exe.dev. 111 IN A 52.35.87.134 52.35.87.134 <- Amazon Technologies Inc. (AT-88-Z)
  • awhitty 5mo ago
    "I am white labeling a cloud"
    • transitorykris 5mo ago
      FTA “Hence the Series A: we have some computers to buy.”
  • MagicMoonlight 5mo ago
    Well yes, because they needed high availability and flexibility and tons of features… Hey wait a minute!
  • skybrian 5mo ago
    Their first location (PDX) is on Amazon I believe and not accepting new customers. They’ve said it’s much more expensive for them than the others. Their other locations are listed here: https://exe.dev/docs/regions https://exe.dev/docs/regions
  • crawshaw 5mo ago
    Hello, author here. Our exe.dev web UI still runs on AWS. We also have a few users left on our VM hosts there, as when we launched in December we were considering building on AWS. Now almost all customer VMs are on other bare metal providers or machines we are racking ourselves. We built our own GLB with the help of another vendor's anycast network. You can see that if you try any of the exe.xyz names generated for user VMs. We would move exe.dev too, but we have a few customers who are compliance sensitive going through it, so we need to get the compliance story right with our own hardware before we can. It is a little annoying being tied to AWS just for that, but very little of our traffic goes through them, so in practice it works.
• hani1808 5mo ago
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• sroussey 5mo ago
  > The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center. Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.
  • ac29 5mo ago
    It was a weird point to make in the post given that exe.dev charges $0.07/GB for transfer. That's arguably worse than the major clouds, who charge about the same for egress but give you free ingress.
    • crawshaw 5mo ago
      Author here. I need to fix our transfer pricing. (In fact I'm going to go look at it now.) I set that number when we launched in December, and we were still considering building on top of AWS, so we put a conservative limit based on what wouldn't break the bank on AWS. Now that we are doing our own thing, we can be far more reasonable.
      • simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
        Love the attitude!! Well done, and good luck with all this. I sent you an email offering help, if any is needed/welcome.
• pjc50 5mo ago
  The "one price" is oddly small for a cloud company. I'm sure it's nice and fast but the $20/mo seems smaller than some companies' free tiers, especially for disk. The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.
  • imafish 5mo ago
    Don’t worry - that will certainly change in the future if they have any kind of success :)
• WhereIsTheTruth 5mo ago
  > 100 GB data transfer+ > $20 a month 2025 or 2005, what's the difference?
  • sudo_cowsay 5mo ago
    inflation
• qaq 5mo ago
  With LLMs there is no real dev velocity penalty of using high perf. langs like say Rust. A pair of 192 Core AMD EPYC boxes will have enough headroom for 99.9% of projects.
  • kennywinker 5mo ago
    That’ll be true for the 0.1% of project that were limited by the speed of their programming language. For the other 99.9% of projects their vibe coded rust can fly and their database, network, or raw computation will still be the bottleneck. (Percentages cited above are tongue-in-cheek, actual numbers are probably different)
    • qaq 5mo ago
      sqlite when used properly can be pushed pretty far. Few biz apps are raw compute limited
• ZihangZ 5mo ago
  [dead]
• speedgoose 5mo ago
  I welcome the initiative but it’s pretty costly compared to the bare metal cloud providers. So the value as to be the platform as service too.
• Growtika 5mo ago
  Congrats. Just checked your homepage. I love the fact you also show this comment "That must be worst website ever made" Made me love the site and style even more
  • vaylian 5mo ago
    But it was made!
• achille 5mo ago
  What will happen to my "Grandfathered Plan" I signed up to test it, don't recall if I gave you my credit card
• k9294 5mo ago
  That's really cool! One thing I'm confused with is how to create a shared resources like e.g. a redis server and connect to it from other vms? It looks now quite cumbersome to setup tailscale or connect via ssh between VMS. Also what about egress? My guess is that all traffic billed at 0.07$ per GB. It looks like this cloud is made to run statefull agents and personal isolated projects and distributed systems or horizontal scaling isn't a good fit for it? Also I'm curious why not railway like billing per resource utilization pricing model? It’s very convenient and I would argue is made for agents era. I did setup for my friends and family a railway project that spawns a vm with disk (statefull service) via a tg bot and runs an openclaw like agent - it costs me something like 2$ to run 9 vms like this.
• clktmr 5mo ago
  > Agents, by making it easiest to write code, means there will be a lot more software. Economists would call this an instance of Jevons paradox. Each of us will write more programs, for fun and for work. There is already so much software out there, which isn't used by anyone. Just take a look at any appstore. I don't understand why we are so obsessed with cranking out even more, whereas the obvious usecase for LLMs should be to write better software. Let's hope the focus shifts from code generation to something else. There are many ways LLMs can assist in writing better code.
  • dgb23 5mo ago
    Both will likely happen to some degree. As for the average quality: it’s unclear. My intuition is that agents lift up the floor to some degree, but at the same time will lead to more software being produced that’s of mediocre quality, with outliers of higher quality emerging at a higher rate than before.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • andai 5mo ago
    Alas, we shifted from quality to quantity somewhere in the mid 19th century.
    • fragmede 5mo ago
      For software?
      • bell-cot 5mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovelware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shovelware
        • fragmede 5mo ago
          What does that have to do with the mid 19th century?
• esher 5mo ago
  Much respect for the ambitous plan, I wish I could do such bold thinking. I am running a small PHP PaaS (fortrabbit) for more than 10 years. For me, it's not only "scratch your own itch", but also "know your audience". So, a limited feature set with a high level of abstraction can also be useful for some users > clear path.
• troupo 5mo ago
  Did... did you just scare Microsoft? They now announced a similar thing https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2047033636923568440 https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2047033636923568440
• pelasaco 5mo ago
  Such statement is so off: "In some tech circles, that is an unusual statement. (“In this house, we curse computers!”) I get it, computers can be really frustrating. But I like computers. I always have. It is really fun getting computers to do things. Painful, sure, but the results are worth it. Small microcontrollers are fun, desktops are fun, phones are fun, and servers are fun, whether racked in your basement or in a data center across the world. I like them all." The reality: Everyone reading his blog or this HN entry loves computers.
• dajonker 5mo ago
  > Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig. So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined networking layer on top of it. After spending a lot of time "optimizing" or "hardening" the cluster, cloud spend has doubled or tripled. Incidents have also doubled or tripled, as has downtime. Debugging effort has doubled or tripled as well. I ended up saying goodbye to those devops folks, nuking the cluster, booted up a single VM with debian, enabled the firewall and used Kamal to deploy the app with docker. Despite having only a single VM rather than a cluster, things have never been more stable and reliable from an infrastructure point of view. Costs have plummeted as well, it's so much cheaper to run. It's also so much easier and more fun to debug. And yes, a single VM really is fine, you can get REALLY big VMs which is fine for most business applications like we run. Most business applications only have hundreds to thousands of users. The cloud provider (Google in our case) manages hardware failures. In case we need to upgrade with downtime, we spin up a second VM next to it, provision it, and update the IP address in Cloudflare. Not even any need for a load balancer.
  • robshep 5mo ago
    If you replaced k8s with a single app on a single VM then you’ve taken a hype fuelled circuitous route to where you should have been anyway.
  • yard2010 5mo ago
    I don't get it, I think that k8s is the best software written since win95. It redefines computing in the same way IMHO. I have some experience in working with k8s on prod and I loved every moment of it. I'm definitely missing something.
    • RyanHamilton 5mo ago
      Can you expand how it redefined computing for you personally?
• sudo_cowsay 5mo ago
  I'm still new to cloud computing. I've only ever used linode. What is this supposed to be? I couldn't figure out a specific design through the article well. Pls help
• handsometong 5mo ago
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• jeffrallen 5mo ago
  So much good stuff is happening at https://exe.dev https://exe.dev, keep it up guys!
• celrenheit 5mo ago
  Shameless plug: https://clawk.work/ https://clawk.work/ `ssh you/repo/branch@box.clawk.work` → jump directly into Claude Code (or Codex) with your repo cloned and credentials injected. Firecracker VMs, 19€/mo. POC, please be kind.
  • chimpanzee2 5mo ago
    honestly sounds interesting at 19€/mo are you subsidizing it given the sharp rise of LLM costs lately? or are you heavily restricting model access. surely there is no Opus?
    • celrenheit 5mo ago
      The 19€/mo is infra only. Claude Code inside the VM signs in via OAuth to the user's own Anthropic account. I'd love to explore bundling open models (Qwen, etc..) into the subscription down the line, but that needs product validation first, not going to ship something I'm not sure people actually want.
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
  • aayushdutt 5mo ago
    This looks nice, when did you launch this? Do you have validation / paying users?
    • celrenheit 5mo ago
      Launched today, this HN thread is the first public mention. Zero paying users yet, just finished building it over the past few weeks as a solo project. If you want to try it: code `HNPRELAUNCH` on checkout, first month free, then 19€/mo (cancel anytime from your Stripe receipt). Limited to the first 20 redemptions, expires in a week. Honest feedback on what breaks would mean a lot.
  • hmokiguess 5mo ago
• rambambram 5mo ago
  Now that we're talking about clouds... what happened to the word 'webhosting'?
• bedstefar 5mo ago
  This looks like an excellent platform for running a "homelab" in the cloud (no, the irony is not lost on me) for lighter stuff like Readeck, Calibre-web, Immich. Maybe even Home Assistant too if we can find a way (Tailscale?) to get the mDNS/multicast traffic tunnelled.
  • omnimus 5mo ago
    With pricing 100gb/8usd Immich would be wildly uneconomical. Better to wait for upcoming immich hosting to support the project or use ente.io - those are 1tb/10usd.
    • bedstefar 5mo ago
      That's a good tip, thanks. What I meant to say was that there's probably at least a handful of self-hosted services you could run to offset that $20/mo. Another one could be Bitwarden, although I don't host my own password manager personally. Or netbird. You get the point
• jrflowers 5mo ago
  > The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center. > $160/month 50 VM 25 GB disk+ 100 GB data transfer+ 100GB/mo is <1mbps sustained lmao
• asiffareed 5mo ago
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• tamimio 5mo ago
  > $20/month for your VMs >One price, no surprises. You get 2 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of disk—shared across up to 25 VMs. This might sounds like a good thing compared to the current state of clouds, but what’s better than that is having your own. The other day I got a used optiplex for $20, it had 2TB hdd, 265gb ssd, 16gb, and corei7. This is a one time payment, not monthly. You can setup proxmox, have dozens of lxc and vm, and even nest inside them whatever more lxc too, your hardware, physically with you, backed up by you, monitored by you, and accessed only by you. If you have stable internet and electricity, there’s really no excuse not to invest on your own hardware. A small business can even invest in that as well, not just as a personal one. Go to rackrat.net and grab a used server if you are a business, or a good station for personal use.
• boesboes 5mo ago
  I have mixed feelings about this concept, I agree that the way clouds work now is far from great and stronger abstractions are possible. But this article offers nothing of the sort, it just handwaves 'we solve some problem and that saves you tokens'??? Checking the current offering, it's just prepaid cloud-capacity with rather low flexibility. It's cheap though, so that is nice I guess. But does this solve anything new? Anything fly.io orso doesn't solve? What is the new idea here? Or is it just the vibes?
  • ignoramous 5mo ago
    > It's cheap though As another user notes in this thread, exe.dev isn't that cheap. Their bandwidth pricing is £7/100gb. The lowest compute tier is £20/mo (Fly.io machines/sprites can go for less than £2/mo). > Anything fly.io also doesn't solve? exe.dev is comparable to sprites.dev Fly.io launched recently; but with a different pricing model. David, by the way of Tailscale, themselves were among early users of Fly.io. I read some of David's commentary on "Cloud 1.0" as taking a dig at their friends at Fly.io, too. This is going to be interesting...
• socketcluster 5mo ago
  Virtual machines are the wrong abstraction. Anyone who has worked with startups knows that average developers cannot produce secure code. If average developers are incapable of producing secure code, why would average non-technical vibe-coders be able to? They don't know what questions to ask. There's no way vibe coders can produce secure backend software with or without AI. The average software that AI is trained on is insecure. If the LLM sees a massive pile of fugly vibe-coded spaghetti and you tell it "Make it secure please", it will turn into a game of Whac-a-Mole. Patch a vulnerability and two new ones appear. IMO, the right solution is to not allow vibe-coders to access the backend. It is beyond their capabilities to keep it secure, reliable and scalable, so don't make it their responsibility. I refuse to operate a platform where a non-technical user is "empowered" to build their own backend from scratch. It's too easy to blame the user for building insecure software. But IMO, as a platform provider, if you know that your target users don't have the capability to produce secure software, it's your fault; you're selling them footguns.
• qxmat 5mo ago
  Europe is crying out for sovereign clouds. If this is to be a viable alt cloud, US jurisdiction is a no. Not sure we can move away from cpu/memory/io budgeting towards total metal saturation because code isn't what it used to be because no one handles malloc failure any more, we just crash OOM
  • effisfor 5mo ago
    For anybody interested, the meat of 'EU sovereign' means EU companies, not US or UK companies with EU servers. (because of CLOUD Act and the UK-US bilateral arrangement connected to it). International visitors might tell us more about benefits of non EU, US or UK nexus companies/legal/rights.
  • Quothling 5mo ago
    Europe is already moving into the EU cloud. Hetzner, OGH Cloud and so on as well as local data centers where partner companies set up own cloud with various things to rival office 365. So far it's mainly the public sector. My own city cut their IT budget by 70% by switching from Microsoft. The key point is the partner companies. Almost nobody is actually running their own clouds the way they would with various 365 products, AWS or Azure. They buy the cloud from partners, similar to how they used to (and still do) buy solutions from Microsoft partners. So if you want to "sell cloud" you're probably going to struggle unless you get some of these onboard. Which again would probably be hard because I imagine a lot of what they sell is sort of a package which basically runs on VM's setup as part of the package that they already have.
• Razengan 5mo ago
  Isn't it high time to figure out a distributed physical layer / swarm internet or whatever the buzzword is? Would be perfect for distributed AI too..
• sahil-shubham 5mo ago
  The point about VMs being the wrong shape because they’re tied to CPU/memory resonates hard. The abstraction forces you to pay for time, not work. I ended up buying a cheap auctioned Hetzner server and using my self-hostable Firecracker orchestrator on top of it (https://github.com/sahil-shubham/bhatti https://github.com/sahil-shubham/bhatti, https://bhatti.sh https://bhatti.sh) specifically because I wanted the thing he’s describing — buy some hardware, carve it into as many VMs as I want, and not think about provisioning or their lifecycle. Idle VMs snapshot to disk and free all RAM automatically. The hardware is mine, the VMs are disposable, and idle costs nothing. The thing that, although obvious, surprised me most is that once you have memory-state snapshots, everything becomes resumable. I make a browser sandbox, get Chromium to a logged-in state, snapshot it, and resume copies of that session on demand. My agents work inside sandboxes, I run docker compose in them for preview environments, and when nothing’s active the server is basically idle. One $100/month box does all of it.
  • codethief 5mo ago
    > My agents work inside sandboxes Out of interest, what sandboxing solution do you use?
    • sahil-shubham 5mo ago
      Not sure what you mean. I use the above linked personal project, bhatti, which internally uses Firecracker microVMs.
      • codethief 5mo ago
        Ah, for some reason I didn't make the connection between your VM setup and your agent sandbox setup and thought those were two separate things. Sorry about that!
        • sahil-shubham 5mo ago
          No worries! I too have been using machines/sandboxes/VMs/microVMs very interchangeably these days. Former is understood by a broader group, but latter is more precise. Trying to find a balance.
• tee-es-gee 5mo ago
  I will follow this one for sure. There are a few more companies with the extremely ambitious goal of "a better AWS", and I am interested in the various strategies they take to approach that goal incrementally. A service offering VMs for $20 is a long way from AWS, but I see how it makes sense as a first step. AWS also started with EC2, but in a completely different environment with no competition.
• _nhh 5mo ago
  just take a look at hetzner cloud. Its everything 99% of the people need, good pricing. Convert that ux to terminal and you done
• nopurpose 5mo ago
  From the linked blog post: > The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center. From the exe.dev pricing page: > additional data transfer $0.07/GB/month So at least on the network price promise they don't seem to deliver, still costs an arm and a leg like your neighbourhood hyperscaler. Overall service looks interesting, I like simplicity with convenience, something which packet.net deliberately decided not to offer at the time.
  • ignoramous 5mo ago
    If it was anyone else, I'd have totally lost trust after seeing such a cynically diabolical take. I do eventually expect the co-founders at exe.dev, David & Josh, to workout someway to meet the promises laid out in TFA.
• piokoch 5mo ago
  How this is different from getting dedicated server from any other provider? Typically you need to pay a bit more - $40-$50 but you get more RAM and cores. And what it has to do with the "cloud"? Cloud means one use cloud-provided services - security, queue, managed database, etc. and that's their selling point. This exe.dev is a bare server where I can install what I want, this is fine, but this is not a cloud and, frankly speaking, nothing new.
• PunchyHamster 5mo ago
  The author seems to have no clue what is cloud problem, and what is k8s problem, and is blaming everything on k8s. The whole post reeks of ignorance. I have no love to k8s but he is just flat out putting out false information. > Finally, clouds have painful APIs. This is where projects like K8S come in, papering over the pain so engineers suffer a bit less from using the cloud. K8s's main function isn't to paint over existing cloud APIs, that is just necessity when you deploy it in cloud. On normal hardware it's just an orchestration layer, and often just a way to pass config from one app to another in structured format. > But VMs are hard with Kubernetes because the cloud makes you do it all yourself with lumpy nested virtualization. Man discovered system designed for containers is good with containers, not VMs. More news at 10 > Disk is hard because back when they were designing K8S Google didn’t really even do usable remote block devices, and even if you can find a common pattern among clouds today to paper over, it will be slow. Ignorance. k8s have abstractions over a bunch of types of storage, for example using Ceph as backend will just use KVM's Ceph backend, no extra overhead. It also supports "oldschool" protocols used for VM storage like NFS or iSCSI. It might be slow in some cases for cloud if cloud doesn't provide enough control, but that's not k8s fault. > Networking is hard because if it were easy you would private link in a few systems from a neighboring open DC and drop a zero from your cloud spend. He mistakes cloud problems with k8s problems(again). All k8s needs is visibility between nodes. There are multiple providers to achieve that, some with zero tunelling, just routing. It's still complex, but no more than "run a routing daemon". I expect his project to slowly reinvent cloud APIs and copying what k8s and other projects did once he starts hitting problems those solutions solved. And do it worse, because instead of researching of why and why not that person seems to want to throw everything out with learning no lessons. Do not give him money
• tlb 5mo ago
  I think clouds pay a huge abstraction penalty to allow tiny VMs. I guess it helps with onboarding and $10 personal VPNs. But I have never needed a fraction of a computer. I want to rent some number of full computers of various sizes, consisting of CPU, memory, and flash disk. Hetzner is closer than AWS, and I think/hope that’s what Crawshaw is aiming for.
  • phrotoma 5mo ago
    Allow? I understood tiny VM's to be something (at least AWS) added to try to squeeze more utilization out of idle hardware.
    • tlb 5mo ago
      I understand the appeal from AWS's perspective. Customer A pays for a 32 vCPU VM, which they run on 32-core hardware. Then they can also squeeze in customer B's 1 vCPU instance running a blog, and no one notices. Free money! But I don't want to be either of those customers. It means the whole system has an extra layer of abstraction, so they can juggle VMs around. It's why you need slow EBS instead of just getting a flash drive in the same case as the CPU, with 0.01x the latency.
  • ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
    The key to renting a fraction of a computer is scaling up. If I can rent 1/8th of a computer, I can also rent 3/8ths and 1/2 and then go to a full computer, if that capacity is necessary. The key to scaling up is to have big-enough hardware on the backend. If Hetzner is renting out bare metal instances then they can only rent out the sizes that they have. If a cloud provider invests in really big single systems, they can offer fractions of those systems to multiple tenants, some of whom scale up to use the entire system, and some who don't. I think that is a win-win. A fractional VM is also a fungible VM. If the tenant calls to spin up a certain size VM, then the backend can find suitable hardware for it from a menu of sizes. Smaller VMs can slot in anywhere there is room, not just on a designated bare-metal system. A cloud provider is always going to want to maximize their rack space, wattage/heat, and resource usage. So they will invest in high-density systems at every chance. On the other hand, cloud tenants will have diverse needs, including some fraction of those big computers.
• duriantaco 5mo ago
  should log the journey down and os it!
• synack 5mo ago
  Have we already forgotten about the NSA's "SSL added and removed here! :)" slide that Snowden showed us? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641378
  • stingraycharles 5mo ago
    I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. Cloud is bad?
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • synack 5mo ago
      Nevermind, I misread their HTTPS proxy documentation. Cloud is fine.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• gregdelhon 5mo ago
  You should do it in Europe, so much demand for European clouds and very weak offerings.
  • hkpack 5mo ago
    US company doing cloud in Europe changes nothing because of the CLOUD Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
    • nickpsecurity 5mo ago
      Ot actually doesn't change their recommendation. There will be less, market share among people really worried about the American government. Others would be happy to pay for a better cloud run locally mostly under local laws.
  • kelvinjps10 5mo ago
    hezner, OVH? in terms of price and just having a vps that works european clouds are better than the american ones, for me is easier to understand a vps that is just *Linux* that whatever AWS or GCP are doing.
• ndr 5mo ago
  exe.dev landing page is sublime. The call to action is "ssh exe.dev" and you can bet it works.
  • joshgel 5mo ago
    I love the line on the landing page with a link back to hn: > That must be worst website ever made. the level of confidence (this is a second time founder after all) to put that on their website gives me confidence that they can make this work
• _joel 5mo ago
  As someone who has built and managed clouds, good luck to them, you'll need it :)
• AashiyaShaikh 5mo ago
  Ilike to working with reap name
• JokerDan 5mo ago
  I have had an eye on this for a while (found via pi.dev) but I don't really have a solid use case for it, but the idea/concept of is appealing where the price is not. I can buy a £100-150 mini-pc with better hardware to run 24/7 for my own VMs extending my homelab (granted my ISP doesn't put any restrictions on me, I know many others can't say the same). You can see their base docker image here - https://github.com/boldsoftware/exeuntu https://github.com/boldsoftware/exeuntu
• _davide_ 5mo ago
  Thank you, but no thanks
• ludjer 5mo ago
  I mean the whole ebs complaint is invalid you are complaining about a san disk vs local disk. If you want high speed local storage use a d instance with nvme storage.
• satnhak 5mo ago
  AWS. Months of complex dev work to build using their CDK. Terrible disk speed. Frustrating permissions systems. Tiny deployments that take 30 minutes. Rollbacks that get stuck for hours. What you end up with is about 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM for $1000+ per month. No wonder Bezos could send his wife and Katie Perry on a jolly into space. The world's richest man 1 IOP at a time. For that money I can get 5 big bare metal boxes on OVH with fast SSDs, put k0s on them, fast deploy with kluctl, cloudflare tunnels for egress. Backups to a cheap S3 bucket somewhere. I'll never look at another cloud provider.
  • BirAdam 5mo ago
    If you're using cloudflare tunnels, you don't even need to be on OVH. You could seriously host anywhere, like your own basement.
    • skullone 5mo ago
      I have a basement, and a garage, and 2 sheds... I still dont wanna run servers at home. I use OVH, I just rent a server at their Hillsboro OR, US datacenter, just a few miles from my home, i know the twists and turns the fiber goes between there even.
• arbol 5mo ago
  Very cool signup!
  • kordlessagain 5mo ago
    https://orbit-disk.exe.xyz:8000/ https://orbit-disk.exe.xyz:8000/ I like the way you can tell it what you want and it makes it. Very cool.
    • indigodaddy 5mo ago
      Gotta set it to public if you want it public: https://exe.dev/docs/proxy https://exe.dev/docs/proxy
• aayushdutt 5mo ago
  Wondering what runtime is the infra under the hood. Firecracker? Traditional VM? Docker Containers?
  • crawshaw 5mo ago
    Author here. Most of our infra is custom, the VMM is based on cloud-hypervisor (a project spiritually similar to Firecracker). We have a lot of work to do, including on the VMM, but right now there is more value for users if we spend our time on the VM management layer and GLB.
• dfsff 5mo ago
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• jFriedensreich 5mo ago
  I have trouble seeing how this is different to linode, if i invest time in a new VM api, this has to work for cloud or my own machines transparently. Lastly as much as i share the disappointment in k8s promise, this seems a bit too simple, there is a reason homelabs mostly standardised on compose files.
  • iqihs 5mo ago
    linode came to mind as well but OP seems to be much more focused on building cloud as a hardware service rather than VM
• 999900000999 5mo ago
  I really want an open source version of Firebase with feature parity. I don’t care about how the backend works. Superbase requires magical luck to self host. A lot of cloud providers have very generous free tiers to hook you and then the moment things take off , it’s a small fortune to keep the servers on.
  • xixixao 5mo ago
    Convex's open source version is OK as long as you don't expect huge load.
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo ago
  Hi David, thanks for trying to fix the cloud. There is a persistent problem with all cloud providers that none of them has fixed yet (and I don't expect any ever will). I imagine users will not care about this issue, so this might not be worth solving. But if you'd like to have the only cloud provider (or technology in general) that can solve this problem, it would make cloud computers less annoying. If you want to run a website in the cloud, you start with an API, right? A CRUD API with commands like "make me a VPC with subnet 1.2.3.4/24", "make me a VM with 2GB RAM and 1 vCPU", "allow tcp port 80 and 443 to my VM", etc. Over time you create and change more things; things work, everybody's happy. At some point, one of the things changes, and now the website is broken. You could use Terraform or Ansible to try to fix this, by first creating all the configs to hopefully be in the right state, then re-running the IaC to re-apply the right set of parameters. But your website is already down and you don't really want to maintain a complex config and tool. You can't avoid this problem because the cloud's design is bad. The CRUD method works at first to get things going. But eventually VMs stop, things get deleted, parameters of resources get changed. K8s was (partly) made to address this, with a declarative config and server which constantly "fixes" the resources back to the declared state. But K8s is hell because it uses a million abstractions to do a simple thing: ensure my stuff stays working. I should be able to point and click to set it up, and the cloud should remember it. Then if I try to change something like the security group, it should error saying "my dude, if you remove port 443 from the security group, your website will go down". Of course the cloud can't really know what will break what, unless the user defines their application's architecture. So the cloud should let the user define that architecture, have a server component that keeps ensuring everything's there and works, and stops people from footgunning themselves. Everything that affects the user is a distributed system with mutable state. When that state changes, it can break something. So the system should continuously manage itself to fix issues that could break it. Part of that requires tracking dependencies, with guardrails to determine if a change might break something. Another part requires versioning the changes, so the user (or system) can easily roll back the whole system state to before it broke. This abstraction is complicated, but it's a solution to a complex problem: keeping the system working. No cloud deals with this because it's too hard. But your cloud is extremely simple, so it might work. Ideally, every resource in your cloud (exe.dev) should work this way. From your team membership settings, to whether a proxy is public, the state of your VM, your DNS settings, the ssh keys allowed, email settings, http proxy integration / repo integration settings / their attachments, VM tags & disk sizes, etc. Over time your system will add more pieces and get more complex, to the point that implementing these system protections will be too complex and you won't even consider it. But your system is small right now, so you might be able to get it working. The end result should be less pain for the user because the system protects them from pain (fixing broken things, preventing breaking things), and more money for you because people like systems that don't break. But it's also possible nobody cares about this stuff until the system gets really big, so maybe your users won't care. It would be nice to have a cloud that fixes this tho.
• thelastgallon 5mo ago
  This is being accurately called "cloud for developers". If it were for enterprise, it should cost 1000x to create thousands of positions, multiple VPs, executives, etc with a bill in 100s of millions of dollars. Execs wants high capex/opex and a massive headcount. BIGG numbers mean bigger titles and compensation.
• thelastgallon 5mo ago
  Hilariously, they have this linked (“That must be worst website ever made.”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399903 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46399903) under What people are saying.
  • indigodaddy 5mo ago
    The 2.0 website they never wanted: https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/ https://exe-muttha-fukken-dev.exe.xyz/
• nojvek 5mo ago
  If someone is building a new cloud, worth learning a few lessons from Cloudflare. Perhaps the VM idea is old. The unit is a worker encapsulated in some deployable container. In the world of Cloudflare workers - especially durable objects that are guaranteed to have one of them running in the world with a tightly bound database. The way I think of apps has changed. My take is devs want a way to say “run this code, persist this info, microsecond latency, never go down, scale within this $ budget” It’s crazy how good a deal $5/mo cloudflare standard plan is. Obviously many startups raise millions and they gotta spend millions. However the new age of scale to zero, wake up in millisecond, process the request and go back to sleep is a new paradigm. Vs old school of over provision for max capacity you will ever need. Google has a similar, scale to zero container story but their cold startup time is in seconds. Too slow.
• dzonga 5mo ago
  finally a cloud 'vendor' that understands that modern computers are fast. if we go back to the principle that modern computers are really fast, SSDs are crazy fast and we remove the extra cruft of abstractions - software will be easier to develop - and we wouldn't have people shilling 'agents' as a way for faster development. ultimately the bottleneck is our own thinking. simple primitives, simpler thinking.
• mancerayder 5mo ago
  Numerous people are denigrating DevOps people - resume padding, over-complexity, etc. I think that's startup-thinking, at least in my experience. Maybe in a small company the DevOps guy does all infra. In my experience, especially in financial services, who runs the show are platform engineering MDs - these people want maximum control for their software engineers, who they split up into a thousand little groups who all want to manage their own repos, their own deployments, their own everything. It's believed that microservices gives them that power. I guarantee you devops people hate complexity, they're the ones getting called at night and on the weekend, because it's supposedly always an "infrastructure issue" until proven otherwise. Also the deployment logs end up in a log aggregation system, and god forbid software developers troubleshoot their own deployments by checking logs. It's an Incident. Are microservices a past fad yet?
• schpet 5mo ago
  as an exe customer i'm really happy to see this. i don't even use half of their features (such as the https proxy, or the LLM agent) but it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone. i use hetzner too in the same way for a bit of redundancy but exe seems less likely to delete all my machines and data. every time i've had an issue or question, it's been the same sympathetic people helping me out. over email, in plain text.
• hbhhh 5mo ago
  HeavyBit is absolutely gross. I've heard lots of horrible things about them from multiple founders. One of my friends was told to come to a sex party that was all male and he is straight. It soured his relationship with the firm so much he ended up winding down the business.
  • furyofantares 5mo ago
    Does that any anything to do with exe.dev?
    • pratyahava 5mo ago
      the first paragraph in the linked post says "Major investors are Amplify, CRV, and HeavyBit." but i know nothing about what the comment says, just answering your question.
  • iqihs 5mo ago
    o.O
• aliasxneo 5mo ago
  There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall one particular incident where we had a complete blackout for about an hour. The people predisposed to hating Kubernetes did everything they could to blame it all on that "shitty k8s system." Turns out the service in question simply DOS'd by opening up tens of thousands of ports in a matter of seconds when a particular scenario occurred. I'm neither in the k8s is the future nor k8s is total trash. It's a good system for when you genuinely need it. I've never understand the other two sides of the equation.
  • radlad 5mo ago
    The complaints I see about Kubernetes are typically more about one of two things: (a) this looks complex to learn, and I don't have a need for it - existing deployment patterns solve my use case, or (b) Kubernetes is much less inefficient than running software on bare-metal (energy or cost.) Usually they go hand in hand.
    • p_l 5mo ago
      The funniest thing is that kubernetes was designed for bare metal running, not cloud...
      • jeffbee 5mo ago
        Yeah if someone says that k8s is costing them energy they are either using it very, very incorrectly, or they just don't know what they are talking about.
        • radlad 5mo ago
          Running a Kubernetes deployment requires running many additional orchestration services that bare-metal deployments (whether running on-prem or in the cloud) do not.
• arjie 5mo ago
  I can't see why I would want this, but I do love Tailscale so I'm excited to see what new stuff he comes up with here.
• moralestapia 5mo ago
  Tangential. Is there a name for this style of writing? I come across it regularly. I'd describe it as forcefully modest, "I'm just a simple guy" kind of thing. With a dash of "still a child on the inside". I always picture it as if the guy from the King of Queens meme wrote it. "I guess I'm just really into books, heh" - Bezos (obviously non-real, hypothetical quote, meant to illustrate the concept) This style is also very prevalent in Twitter bios. Since it's a "literary" style that is quite common, I'm sure it has been characterized and named. GPT says it's "aw-shucks", but I think that's a different thing.
• messh 5mo ago
  There are plenty of alternatives out there. I built https://shellbox.dev https://shellbox.dev, which gives you instant vms via ssh where unlike exe you pay only for what you use-- scale to zero. It is also regular linux, supporting vscode and zed remote, Nested virtualization, etc. If you're looking to invest im fine with only $5M :)
  • pbronez 5mo ago
    Neat service. Website doesn't provide enough information for me to trust any workloads to it. Not clear where the underlying infrastructure is, what security guarantees I get, etc.
    • messh 5mo ago
      Thanks for the feedback. Ill improve it. In the meanwhile, there are more technical details on this blog post: https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html https://shellbox.dev/blog/race-to-the-bottom.html
      • dr_kiszonka 5mo ago
        I quickly grokked the product and pricing from Exe's website. You need a page with less text, less scrolling and more specifics. Can VMs not autostop? Will an API call to a service on a stopped VM fail at the first attempt? Your pricing formula is simple but I don't want to do the math on my phone. How do payments work exactly (processor)? Running Shellbox 24/7 is ~25% cheaper than Exe, with 2x storage but 50% of RAM. Exe seems to provide additional features (which I don't need). Not presenting this information upfront and in an easily digestible format makes me suspicious. I dig the overall aesthetic and may give Shellbox v2 a try.
  • SeriousM 5mo ago
    The other day I vibed a very stable codeserver (vscode in browser) instance with zellij browser mode (console in browser), syncthing (filesyncing), ssh, pi agent and wireguard. No exposed ports, every web frontend is password secured. I don't want to make that public, it's my way of an isolated dev environment and it runs on my private raspberry behind my tv. Costs me nothing. I hope you have a good success with your service.
• rib3ye 5mo ago
  It seems really cool, but the entry-level tier just seems too expensive. I can get a single pain-in-the-ass OVH VPS for $7. I just need something better than that for the same price.
• ianberdin 5mo ago
  “Everything is shit. Believe me. We will do something better, just believe me.” Jokes aside: - k8s is insane peace of software. A right tool for a big problem. Not for your toys. Yes, it is crazy difficult to setup and manage. Then what? - cloud has bad and slow disk. BS. They have perfectly fast NVME. Something else? That’s it. Why I am so confident? I used to setup and manage kubernetes for 2 years. I have some experience. Do I use it more? Nope. Not a right tool for me. Ansible with some custom Linux tools fits better for Me. I also build my own cloud. But if I say it less loud: hosting to host websites for https://playcode.io https://playcode.io. Yea, it is hard and with a lot of compromises. Like networking, yes I want to communicate between vms in any region. Or disks and reliability. What about snapshots? And many bare metal renters gives only 1Gbt/s. Which is not fine. Or they ask way more for 10Gbt uplink. So it is easy to build some limited and unreliable shit or non scalable.
• dbmikus 5mo ago
  I really like exe.dev's pricing model where I pay a fixed monthly fee for compute and then can split it up into as many VMs as I want. I use exe.dev to run little vibe-coded apps and it's nice to just leave them running without a spend meter ticking up. We're thinking about switching to this pricing model for our own startup[1] (we run sandboxed coding agents for dev teams). We run on Daytona right now for sandboxes. Sometimes I spin up a sandboxed agent to make changes to an app, and then I leave it running so my teammate can poke around and test the running app in the VM, but each second it's running we (and our users) incur costs. We can either build a bunch of complicated tech to hibernate running sandboxes (there's a lot of tricky edge cases for detecting when a sandbox is active vs. should be hibernated) or we can just provision fixed blocks of compute. I think I prefer the latter. [1] https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika
• rbren 5mo ago
  Lots of negativity towards k8s in here. It's always funny to me when $WILDLY_POPULAR_TECH gets ripped apart like this, as though no one has ever had a positive experience with it. I've seen similar pile-ons for React, microservices, git, PHP, JavaScript, cloud services, really anything that's been adopted at scale.
  • layer8 5mo ago
    It’s only natural that seeing frequent complaints mostly happens for tech that has high adoption. Stuff that nobody uses doesn’t get many complaints.
  • adamors 5mo ago
    HN has had a hate boner for K8s for as long as I can remember. In my experience, K8s is a million times better than legacy shit it is usually replacing. The Herokus, the Ansible soup, the Chef/Puppet soup before that etc. The legacy infra that was held together by glue and sweat that everybody was afraid to touch.
    • stackskipton 5mo ago
      As SRE, totally agree. Most companies I've been at where we implement K8S, which is around 30-50 VMs, ends up building their own, shittier Kubernetes. This blog post: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubernetes/ https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern... is a favorite of mine.
    • theideaofcoffee 5mo ago
      "But it's my legacy shit and I understand it and I haven't taken the time to learn something new because that's scary so I'll just piss on anything attempting to replace it." Human nature, really.
  • mrhottakes 5mo ago
    people love to make posts like "I used k8s to host my personal website from my homelab and it was too complicated!"
• EvanAnderson 5mo ago
  This makes me wonder if I could get a few million in funding to rent out some Oxide racks. I'd love to touch some Oxide hardware and this seems like a good way to do it.
• pclark 5mo ago
  I think I am interested in this? I run a bunch of small web apps, currently as fly.io machines. I love fly, but it adds up when I have a bunch of small things that I want isolated — I wish I could have even smaller Fly instances. Exe.dev seems like a good middleground where I can allocate the compute from tiny to large. (?)
  • indigodaddy 5mo ago
    I use both fly and exe. Exe isn't really "docker image as the app"-focused like fly, but if you want to sort of mimic the fly deploy process you kinda sorta could make it work for you I would think. This might help: https://exe.dev/docs/customization https://exe.dev/docs/customization
• stego-tech 5mo ago
  I'm excited to see what they put together, because this raises a number of similar gripes I have with public cloud in its current state: * Insistence on adding costly abstractions to overcome the limitations of non-fungible resources * Deliberate creation of over or under-sized resource "pieces" instead of letting folks consume what they need * Deliberate incompatibility with other vendors to enforce lock-in I pitched a "Universal Cloud" abstraction layer years ago that never got any traction, and honestly this sounds like a much better solution anyhow. When modern virtualization is baked into OS kernels, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to enforce arbitrary resource sizes or limits other than to inflate consumption. Kubernetes without all the stuff that makes it a bugbear to administrate, in other words. Let me buy/rent a pool of stuff and use it how I see fit, be it containers or VMs or what-have-you.
• ely-s 5mo ago
  Thank you! <3
• Abby_101 5mo ago
  Half the work of pricing a solo SaaS is modeling what a bad month looks like if egress or IOPS spike. You end up pricing defensively to protect against your own infra bill instead of pricing to the value you provide. A fixed bucket of compute with clear limits is way easier to build a business on than a meter that could run anywhere.
• bradley13 5mo ago
  Ok, what am I missing? exe.dev says: "$20/month for your VMs One price, no surprises. You get 2 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of disk". Fine, their UI is different, but I don't see any real difference from other providers.
  • joevandyk 5mo ago
    You get one machine. On that machine you can (easily) make an arbitrary number of VMs. Each VM has their own URL that you can share (or make private). See features: https://exe.dev/docs/customization https://exe.dev/docs/customization
• sealthedeal 5mo ago
  I just want to say this has been the greatest experience I have ever had for signing up for a new service etc. I really really loved this entire experience. It has truly inspired me!
• achiles 5mo ago
  [dead]
• mrcwinn 5mo ago
  I appreciate the confidence that comes with a clear vision - but please make docs useful from day 1. But remember, while you know what's in your mind, the user does not. These are nice declarative statements but have almost no meaningful substance. > Setup scripts have a maximum size. Use indirection. [What's the maximum size?] > Shelley is a coding agent. It is web-based, works on mobile. [Cool model bro. Any details you want to share?]
• germandiago 5mo ago
  Let me see if I understand it. The TL;DR is that instead of asking for VMs and fit things there you reserve the CPU and RAM and do with that whatever you want? Number of mVMs, etc.?
• kitsune1 5mo ago
  [dead]
• d_burfoot 5mo ago
  I'm not sure if this is the direction the OP is going, but I would love to see a world where local small-time investors can get a bank loan, rent a facility, set up a bunch of computers, and run open-source cloud software on them that provides 95% of the features that most businesses need. Running a cloud data center could be a business like operating a self-storage facility or a car wash. Small investors love this kind of operation.
  • jacobsenscott 5mo ago
    These are called co-los (co-location facilities). Probably any medium to large city has a few.
  • DASD 5mo ago
    This brings back painful yesteryear memories when consultants would push Microsoft Small Business Server for an on-prem all in one IT solution and charge extra to move to the cloud(colocation). A Linux-based alternative appeared named Clark Connect.
  • mrhottakes 5mo ago
    then private equity moves in, buys up the small and inefficient local data centers, and consolidates them into a massive conglomerate that can charge whatever they want
• oxag3n 5mo ago
  Comparing laptop SSD to cloud network drive is misleading. EC2 provides the *d VMs that have SSDs with high IOPS at much lower cost than network SSDs. They are ephemeral, but so is laptop and its SSD - it can loose the data. From AWS docs "If you stop, hibernate, or terminate an instance, data on instance store volumes is lost.".
  • senko 5mo ago
    If I stop, hibernate or power off the laptop, the data is most definitely not lost.
• ryanisnan 5mo ago
  I wish you great luck! I want this to succeed.
• pxc 5mo ago
  This is the problem for me with the cloud: > Finally, clouds have painful APIs. This is where projects like K8S come in, papering over the pain so engineers suffer a bit less from using the cloud. But VMs are hard with Kubernetes because the cloud makes you do it all yourself with lumpy nested virtualization. Disk is hard because back when they were designing K8S Google didn’t really even do usable remote block devices, and even if you can find a common pattern among clouds today to paper over, it will be slow. Networking is hard because if it were easy you would private link in a few systems from a neighboring open DC and drop a zero from your cloud spend. It is tempting to dismiss Kubernetes as a scam, artificial make work designed to avoid doing real product work, but the truth is worse: it is a product attempting to solve an impossible problem: make clouds portable and usable. It cannot be done. Please learn from Unix's mistakes. Learn from Nix. Support create-before-destroy patterns everywhere. Forego all global namespaces you can. Support rollbacks everywhere. If any cloud provider can do that, cloud IaC will finally stop feeling so fake/empty compared to a sane system like NixOS.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• pokpokpok 5mo ago
  As a happy customer, godspeed to exe.dev. I've found the quality and simplicity to be an attractive solution for lazy devops when I need to reach for a second computer
• overfeed 5mo ago
  People who don't understand the software bloat cycle are doomed to repeat it. Lean software -> missing features users want -> add features over time -> bloated mess -> we need a smaller rewrite -> Lean software -> ...
  • chr15m 5mo ago
    True. The solution is to make a different piece of software customised for each person.
    • chanux 5mo ago
      We already have the tech for this. It's large! j/k
      • chr15m 5mo ago
        Ha ha true. It's literally so complicated we don't know how it works.
  • mohamedkoubaa 5mo ago
    It's more of a spiral than a loop, usually the reboot either flops or gets something crucial right and progresses to the point where it challenges the incumbent.
• matt-p 5mo ago
  I love this and agree with it almost in entirety. One thing that would be good to retain is 'regions' e.g 3 DCs under 10KM apart linked with free/very low cost internal network. It is cheap to build in colo these days with the advent of campus XCs and ever lowering cost of DF, optics and 400G/800G switches.
• WatchDog 5mo ago
  I relate to the points about obscure platform limits, and leaky abstractions, but when I look at the exe.dev platform, it might be the most obscure PaaS I've seen, and has it's own strange abstractions. The shell command to start a new vm, has a --prompt flag to get an LLM to configure the VM for you. VM's have no public ipv4 IP, and the ipv6 IP doesn't seem to allow incoming connections. The only supported inbound connections are via their HTTP proxy. There is no private networking. At first I interpreted the complaint about cloud providers not offering nested-virtualization, as something he intends to address by offering it as a feature, but no, instead he means that exe.dev's VM abstraction eschews the need for it.
  • neom 5mo ago
    Yeah I had a giggle about that also. He argues: “cloud abstractions are the wrong shape”, then what they actually ship is: a different abstraction, with even more hidden constraints. I'm very curious how they deal with subscription levels/noisy neighbors.
• syngrog66 5mo ago
  I want to like a Crawshaw startup but seeing anything related to Clawdbot or LLMs is a hard showstopper. Poor judgment or grift.
• adrianojunior 5mo ago
  [dead]
• fizlebit 5mo ago
  I'd like write program / run program / debug program to be as easy as it is in roblox. It isn't that easy though, the set of things you need to do it well is extensive. I wouldn't be averse to a new platform, one in which all io is over highly performant queues, but the moras of existing software tied to unix is large, just look at compilers and all the child processes they launch. It was always shims and it will always be shims.
• anitil 5mo ago
  In classic soft-launch style, their blog is quite good. I really liked reading how they're doing ssh forwarding similar to http reverse proxies using the 'host' header [0] [0] https://blog.exe.dev/ssh-host-header https://blog.exe.dev/ssh-host-header
• throwawayapr23 5mo ago
  I don’t get it. Starting a digital ocean droplet is a single curl call. Starting a hetzner server is as well. Their api’s are completely fine and known to llm’s. Why would agents learn exe’s way of setting up / deploying / binding to ports / auth, rather than just ssh’ing into a vm..?
• irusensei 5mo ago
  I use kubernetes extensively at work. I don't manage the kubernetes cluster anymore since now we have a team that runs centralized services and you can request a namespace with a quota. But back when my team had a dedicated Azure Kubernetes cluster it was not that bad as people says it is and the biggest hassle was the extremely short lived support for each version. Then I started to realize most people who complain are rolling their own which is also not bad since there are products like k3s that are very simple to use. It seems things start to fall apart when they try to stuff it with all kinds of crazy idiotic controllers and the favorite of the month CNI and CSI. I always shake my head when I see people creating sand castles by setting up stuff like Ceph from within the cluster. If you want to play with it keep things simple and have all the persistent data outside of the cluster. Use good old NFS instead of the latest longceph horngluster version. Keep databases and the container registry out. Treat it like a compute pool not a virtual datacenter. Stop recursing chickens inside eggs.
• rldjbpin 5mo ago
  all of the grievances resulting in this move is a simple outcome of the cost of convenience. but it should not need going full opposite end to get something good enough. dedicated servers, as hinted by others here, addresses the vast majority of issues one may face for any non-enterprise needs. if you know about IOPS and care about them, odds are that running a simple open-source project [1] on top of one is all you need to do to move on with your day. need redundancy, etc.? can complement with another one in another provider/region or put CF in front of your box. this is clearly working well enough for some of the commenters who are able to sell their own service on top of this approach. [1] https://disco.cloud/ https://disco.cloud/
• throwawaypath 5mo ago
  What a refreshing read. Not a single woke/DEI religious shibboleth, nor CURRENTYEAR/CURRENTTHING pandering in sight.
• yohamta 5mo ago
  exe.dev は大好きなプロジェクトです。単一の仮想マシン/ローカルマシンに全てを詰め込むアイデアが好きです。私は単一マシン上でのワークフローオーケストレーションの複雑性に関わる問題を解決するため Dagu.sh を開発しています。