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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

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Re: I am building a cloud

#101

Post by wernerb »

dajonker wrote: post #74

> 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 netw…

DevOps lost the plot with the Operator model. When it was being widely introduced as THE pattern I was dismayed. These operators abstract entirely complex services like databases behind yaml and custom go services. When going to kubecon i had one guy tell me he collects operators like candy. Answers on Lifecycle management, and inevitable large architectural changes in an ever changing operator landscape was handwaved away with series of staging and development clusters. This adds so much cost.. Fundamentally the issue is the abstractions being too much and entirely on the DevOps side of the "shared responsibility model". Taking an RDBMS from AWS of Azure is so vastly superior to taking all that responsibility yourself in the cluster.. Meanwhile (being a bit of an infrastructure snob) I run Nixos with systemd oci containers at home. With AI this is the easiest to maintain ever.

Re: I am building a cloud

#102

Post by szszrk »

ianpurton wrote: post #7

I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?

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.

Re: I am building a cloud

#103

Post by fragmede »

rvz wrote: post #85
clktmr wrote: post #49

> 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 s…

There will be only 1 Microsoft® Excel, 1 Google Sheets and 1 LibreOffice and the rest are billions of dead vibe-coded "Excel killers" that no-one uses.

Except that list originally had one item, and that item was Visicalc. Times change, but that list is going to stop being relevant before Excel gets knocked off the list.

If you're doing anything complicated, Excel just doesn't make sense anymore. it'll still the be data exchange format (at least, something more advanced than csv), but it's no longer the only frontend.

"No one uses" is no longer the insult it once was. I don't need or want to make software for every last person on the world to use. I have a very very small list of users (aka me) that I serve very well with most of the software that I generate these days outside of work.

Re: I am building a cloud

#104

Post by RyanHamilton »

yard2010 wrote: post #96
dajonker wrote: post #74

> 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 netw…

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.

Can you expand how it redefined computing for you personally?

Re: I am building a cloud

#105

Post by 1dom »

dajonker wrote: post #74

> 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 netw…

I think this comment and replies capture the problem with Kubernetes. Nobody gets fired for choosing Kubernetes now.

It's obvious to you, me and the other 2 presumably techie people who've responded within 15 mins that you shouldn't have been using Kubernetes. But you probably work in a company of full of techie people, who ended up using Kubernetes.

We have HN, an environment full of techie people here who immediately recognise not to use k8s in 99% of cases, yet in actually paid professional environments, in 99% of cases, the same techie people will tolerate, support and converge on the idea they should use k8s.

I feel like there's an element of the emperors new clothes here.

Re: I am building a cloud

#106

Post by kennywinker »

qaq wrote: post #34

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.

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)

Re: I am building a cloud

#107

Post by sibellavia »

dajonker wrote: post #74

> 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 netw…

Clearly, Kubernetes wasn’t the right solution for your case, and I also agree that using it for smaller architectures is overkill. That said, it’s the standard for large-scale production platforms that need reproducibility and high availability. As of today I don’t see many *truly* viable alternatives and honestly I haven't even seen them.

Re: I am building a cloud

#108

Post by kippinsula »

faangguyindia wrote: post #9

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…

we've done both. Hetzner dedicated was genuinely fine, until a disk started throwing SMART warnings on a Sunday morning and we remembered why we pay 10x elsewhere for some things. probably less about the raw cost and more about which weekends you want back.

Re: I am building a cloud

#109

Post by barrkel »

jeffrallen wrote: post #90
fragmede wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Economics teaches us that a big difference between cost and price attracts competition which should make the price trend towards the cost.

Re: I am building a cloud

#110

Post by kennywinker »

Animats wrote: post #43
vasco wrote: post #18

I know its a personal blog but the writing style is really full of himself. What a martyr, starting a second company.

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.

If you click the first link in the post, about funding, you’ll see they just raised $35mil.
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