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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

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Re: I am building a cloud

#171

Post by rvz »

fragmede wrote: post #103
rvz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "No one uses" is no longer the insult it once was.

It certainly is for lots of businesses, otherwise they go out of business.

There is something called 'revenue' which they need to make from customers which are their 'users', and that revenue pays for the 'operating costs' which includes payroll, office rent, infrastructure etc.

This just means that it is important than ever to know what to build just as how it is built. It is unrealistic for a business to disregard that and to build anything they want and end up with zero users.

No users, No revenue. No revenue, No business.

Re: I am building a cloud

#172

Post by alternatex »

alishayk wrote: post #162
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…

I find it interesting that Hetzner was never a consideration, until... LLMs started recommending them.

Hetzner was raved about before AI was cool. I know since based on those good reviews I moved half of my apps from DigitalOcean to Hetzner. My DigitalOcean droplet was lacking in RAM and it was more expensive for me to grow it than move some stuff to another small VPS on Hetzner.

Re: I am building a cloud

#173

Post by ricardo_lien »

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…

Yes, I've had similar experiences. My life has been much easier since I migrated to ECS Fargate - the service just works great. No more 2AM calls (at least not because of infra incidents), no more cost concerns from my boss.

Re: I am building a cloud

#174

Post by aayushdutt »

celrenheit wrote: post #91

Shameless plug: 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.

This looks nice, when did you launch this? Do you have validation / paying users?

Re: I am building a cloud

#175

Post by psviderski »

sgt wrote: post #167
psviderski wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single VM is indeed the most pragmatic setup that most apps really need. However I still prefer to have at least two for little redundancy and peace of mind. It’s just less stressful to do any upgrades or changes knowing there is another replica in case of a failure. And I’m building and happily using Uncloud ( https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud ) for this (inspired by Kamal). It makes multi-machine setups as si…

That looks pretty interesting. Is it being used in production yet (I mean serious installs) ?

Yes but at small scale. Myself and a handful of others from our Discord run it in production. The core build/push/deploy workflows are stable and most of the heavy lifting at runtime is done by battle-tested projects: Docker, Caddy, WireGuard, Corrosion from Fly.io.

Radboud University recently announced they're rolling it out for managing containers across the faculty which is the most "serious install" I know about, but there could be other: https://cncz.science.ru.nl/en/news/2026-04-15_uncloud/

Re: I am building a cloud

#177

Post by bedstefar »

omnimus wrote: post #156
bedstefar wrote: post #100

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.

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.

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

Re: I am building a cloud

#178

Post by celrenheit »

aayushdutt wrote: post #174
celrenheit wrote: post #91

Shameless plug: 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.

This looks nice, when did you launch this? Do you have validation / paying users?

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.

Re: I am building a cloud

#180

Post by littlestymaar »

adamtulinius wrote: post #89
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…

If you spin up Kubernetes for "a couple of containers to run your web app", I think you're doing something wrong in the first place, also coupled with your comment about adding SDN to Kubernetes. People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.

I have nom doubt that there are legit use cases for something like k8s at Google or other multi-billion companies.

But if its use was confined to this use case, pretty much nobody would be using it (unless as a customer of the organization's infra) and barely would be talking about it (like how there isn't too much talk about Borg).

The reason k8s is a thing in the first place is because it's being used by way too many people for their own goods. (Most people having worked in startups have met too many architecture astronauts in our lives).

If I had to bet, I'd wager that 99% of k8s users are in the “spin a few containers to run your web app” category (for the simple reason that for one billion-dollar tech business using it for legit reasons, there's many thousands early startups who do not).

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