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Exe.dev

exe.dev

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Re: Exe.dev

#31

Post by crawshaw »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #27
crawshaw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, an exe.dev person here. They are VMs, on a crosvm-derived VMM. So I consider them "actually VMs", though we do not currently support custom kernels. You can do VM things in there, like create TUN devices, etc.

Not super important to me (and you state explicitly it may change) but your docs are a little out of date here, I think. crosvm versus Cloud Hypervisor / Kata Containers, is, I think, different? exe.dev ▶ doc how-exedev-works How exe.dev works (how-exedev-works) - press q to exit You're an engineer. We're engineers. Let's talk about what's going on under the hood. An "exe.dev" VM runs on a bare metal machine that exe…

Yes our docs are out of date we are not using Kata, thanks.

Re: Exe.dev

#32

Post by jauntywundrkind »

I really enjoyed using this service. I signed up on my phone two nights ago, (using termux + ssh) and then used the builtin web agent to setup a small webapp. I was up and running with an HTTPS server in minutes, since all the HTTPS certs are automatically taken care of.

I'm not using it yet, but the way that it handles sharing looks incredibly sweet: an excellent way to take "home-cooked software and bare-foot developers" "perfect software: an audience of one" from one to a few / many people. Just sharing links that people can easily sign into, without having to build a whole auth system seems ridiculously easy here, and that is super cool. You don't have to think about it, you can just build your app: this fills a huge gap that makes making connected online software so much easier. https://outofdesk.netlify.app/blog/perfect-software https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334206 https://exe.dev/docs/sharing

I used the included Shelley agent, which has a perfectly adequate simple web ui, to do all development. It was able to debug a bunch of pretty gnarly problems, using screenshots & scrolling down to get check it's work.

My output is a super simple site, very close to vibe coded, in ~90 minutes, but I quite enjoyed setting up a little guestbook project here: https://nan-falcon.exe.xyz/

Re: Exe.dev

#33

Post by achairapart »

JohnMakin wrote: post #6

The description of authentication mechanism is confusing me. it’s over ssh, but how is this integrated? > Private by default, share with discord-style links exe.dev takes care of TLS and auth for you. By default only you can reach your HTTP services, and you have easy mechanims to share them with friends and colleagues. Is anyone with access to a link able to get in?

I also don't understand this: Everyone with the right domain can ssh-in the vm?

Edit: Answered below, thank you.

Re: Exe.dev

#35

Post by MontyCarloHall »

crawshaw wrote: post #30
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

The individual plan says: — $20/month — 25 VMs — 2 CPUs — 8GB RAM — 25GB disk — 100GB bandwidth Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM. If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and band…

No I apologize for the confusion (exe.dev person here). What is different about this service is you get dedicated resources that you share between your VMs. The initial allocation is conservative, we want to give people more (or drop the price). The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM. (I will get a better ve…

>Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.

What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance?

BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user to care about the distinction of running distributed workflows on VMs versus containers, I'm not sure that an extra $5/month is worth your "hypervisor as a service." But then again, HN commenters infamously poopooed Dropbox [0], so what do I know? :-)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Exe.dev

#36

Post by crawshaw »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #35
crawshaw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I apologize for the confusion (exe.dev person here). What is different about this service is you get dedicated resources that you share between your VMs. The initial allocation is conservative, we want to give people more (or drop the price). The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM. (I will get a better ve…

>Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM. What is the advantage of this? Unless you need something exotic like different kernel configurations per instance, what's the problem with using containers on the same instance? BTW, a Hetzner dedicated server with 2 CPUs/8GB RAM that would let me run my own hypervisor is about $14 USD/month. For anyone who's a big enough power user…

Containers aren’t enough for me. I like to do things like create TUN devices, run docker compose, etc. I believe the VM is a fundamentally better abstraction.

Consider this: sometimes when you are using a VPS, you start a new project and say to yourself, "I should put this on a new VPS." Not all the time, but it does happen. And when it does, we are faced with the problem that starting a new project immediately costs us $X/month. I would like a new project to initially cost nothing.

Re: Exe.dev

#38

Post by reactordev »

crawshaw wrote: post #10
reactordev wrote: post #2

Oh I’m going to need more info than this. It’s a service that provides persistent disk and VM’s but doesn’t tell you what those shared resource limits are, what the pricing is, or anything other than to ssh in…

Hello, an exe.dev person here. There are some very early docs, exe.dev/docs (which are also accessible over ssh once you ssh in). There is a lot more to come, very early days, please bear with us. I was not expecting to see it here today.

This kind of stuff is right up my wheelhouse so curious how.

I love the idea of just ssh in and do your thing. I’ll bookmark and come back when there’s some more info. Things are going to move fast…

Re: Exe.dev

#39

Post by [deleted] »

crawshaw wrote: post #30
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

The individual plan says: — $20/month — 25 VMs — 2 CPUs — 8GB RAM — 25GB disk — 100GB bandwidth Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM. If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and band…

No I apologize for the confusion (exe.dev person here). What is different about this service is you get dedicated resources that you share between your VMs. The initial allocation is conservative, we want to give people more (or drop the price). The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM. (I will get a better ve…

[deleted]

Re: Exe.dev

#40

Post by twotwotwo »

So I tried this the other day after Filippo Valsorda, another Go person, posted about it. My reaction was 'whoa, this really makes it easier to start a quick project', and it took a minute to figure out why I felt that way when, I mean, I have a laptop and could spin up cloud stuff--arguably I already had what I needed.

I think it's the combination of 1) really quick to get going, 2) isolated and disposable environments and 3) can be persistent and out there on the Internet.

Often to get element 3, persistent and public, I had to jump through hoops in a cloud console and/or mess with my 'main' resources (install things or do other sysadmin work on a laptop or server, etc.), resources I use for other stuff and would prefer not to clutter up with every experiment I attempt.

Here I can make a thing and if I'm done, I'm done, nothing else impacted, or if it's useful it can stick around and become shared or public. Some other environments also have 'quick to start, isolated, and disposable' down, but are ephemeral only, limited, or don't have great publishing or sharing, and this avoids that trough too. And VMs go well with building general-purpose software you could fling onto any machine, not tied to a proprietary thing.

This is good stuff. I hope they get a sustainable paid thing going. I'd sign up.

Also, though I realize in a sense it'd be competition to a business I just said I like: some parts of the design could work elsewhere too. You could have an open-source "click here to start a thing! and click here to archive it." layer above a VM, machine, or whatever sort of cloud account; could be a lot of fun. (I imagine someone will think "have you looked at X?" here, and yes, chime in, interested in all sorts of potential values of X.)

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