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$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

blog.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 223 posts

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#11
post #10
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

> No custom kernel support How many people run custom kernels? I have used a kernel with realtime extensions enabled but that was a very special case and wouldn't run that in a VM anyway.

> How many people run custom kernels?

How many people want to run an updated kernel without known security vulnerabilities? Or with fixes to relevant issues?

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#12
post #5

[deleted]

How so? For a growing company, the lightweight set of tools and services. And Linode doesn't offer any startup plan discounts.

Well just look at the quality difference of the documentation. That's huge.

Or what you can do with the Linode manager vs the DO one. That's pro vs beginner.

I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#13
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

Most people don't consider custom kernel as a requirement for serious projects. I don't see why this is a joke.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? For a growing company, the lightweight set of tools and services. And Linode doesn't offer any startup plan discounts.

Well just look at the quality difference of the documentation. That's huge. Or what you can do with the Linode manager vs the DO one. That's pro vs beginner. I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.

I'm not sure that I thoroughly agree with you re. documentation. I actually find the community tutorials generally very high-quality despite being user-generated and seemingly not curated [1]. Linode's documentation is not bad either, I just happen to particularly like the idea of community tutorials in DigitalOcean.

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#15
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

> 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter.

This is pretty bad compared to an AWS VPC -- you basically have to manage and sync your own iptables between all your nodes.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#16
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

Most people don't consider custom kernel as a requirement for serious projects. I don't see why this is a joke.

[deleted]

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? For a growing company, the lightweight set of tools and services. And Linode doesn't offer any startup plan discounts.

Well just look at the quality difference of the documentation. That's huge. Or what you can do with the Linode manager vs the DO one. That's pro vs beginner. I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.

> I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.

I could say the same about Linode and DO (beginners) vs AWS (pro).

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? For a growing company, the lightweight set of tools and services. And Linode doesn't offer any startup plan discounts.

Well just look at the quality difference of the documentation. That's huge. Or what you can do with the Linode manager vs the DO one. That's pro vs beginner. I'm not saying anything about the Droplets itself, but everything seems a bit Linode inspired, but cheaper executed.

I'm fully okay with that when the goal is throwing commodity infrastructure at a problem. I still use AWS for most things; the point of DO, for me, is that for "worker"-based tasks, I can do a lot more with 8 $5/mo DO droplets than with one $40/mo on-demand EC2 instance (esp. regarding network-IO-bound tasks.)

I don't need my infrastructure to live in DO; I just need my, well, elastic compute to happen there. Oddly enough, DO is better than EC2 at being an Elastic Compute Cloud. (EC2's advantage, meanwhile, lies in how configurable it is for the non-elastic parts of your workload. It's great for being the host for the infrastructure components that form the "skeleton" of a service, with known work-pool sizes; it's not-so-great for just being a cheap place to offload a bunch of work.)

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#19
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

User-managed kernels are currently supported on new distro releases, and will be supported for all distributions that are released moving forward.

Re: $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

#20
post #15
post #2

Enjoy your free service, but I would avoid paying for Digital Ocean for any serious project. No custom kernel support 1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively. 2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated. 3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities. 4. This has been a known issue since 2013. 5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround. ht…

> 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter. This is pretty bad compared to an AWS VPC -- you basically have to manage and sync your own iptables between all your nodes.

I would suggest that instead of trying to maintain shared state (which IP addresses are blessed) across all of your nodes, you look into using ipsec. Those internal interfaces aren't for security, they're to segment cheap/fast network traffic internal to the dc from expensive/slow/metered traffic that hits the Internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunistic_encryption

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