alt Hacker NewsI am building a cloud
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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.
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.
just take a look at hetzner cloud. Its everything 99% of the people need, good pricing. Convert that ux to terminal and you done
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.
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
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.
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!
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
Have we already forgotten about the NSA's "SSL added and removed here! :)" slide that Snowden showed us?
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.
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.
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.
How difficult is it to build a second startup on the side?
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?
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.
Wondering what runtime is the infra under the hood. Firecracker? Traditional VM? Docker Containers?
What will happen to my "Grandfathered Plan" I signed up to test it, don't recall if I gave you my credit card
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/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?
I wish you great luck! I want this to succeed.
“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. 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.
> $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.
exe.dev landing page is sublime. The call to action is "ssh exe.dev" and you can bet it works.
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.
Thank you, but no thanks
So much good stuff is happening at https://exe.dev, keep it up guys!
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.
Did... did you just scare Microsoft? They now announced a similar thing https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2047033636923568440
Thank you! <3
I know its a personal blog but the writing style is really full of himself. What a martyr, starting a second company.
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.?
should log the journey down and os it!
Now that we're talking about clouds... what happened to the word 'webhosting'?
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.
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.
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..
As someone who has built and managed clouds, good luck to them, you'll need it :)
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.
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.
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.
I want to like a Crawshaw startup but seeing anything related to Clawdbot or LLMs is a hard showstopper. Poor judgment or grift.
> 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+
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?]
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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.