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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

221–230 of 589 posts

Re: I am building a cloud

#221
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Hetzner so much. I'm not affiliated I'm a really happy customer these guys just do everything right.

As long as you never have to interact with them. If you run into issues they have caused themselves, you'll find yourself dealing with a unique mix of arrogance and incompetence.

I've been using Hetzner for ~20 years and every single support interaction I've ever had with them has been top tier. Never AI bots, always humans who are helpful, courteous and prompt. I can't think of a single company, let alone hosting company, whose customer service has been so consistently good.

Re: I am building a cloud

#222

> 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…

And if you need a cluster, Hashicorp Nomad seems like a more reasonable option than full blown kubernetes. I've never actually used it in prod, only a lab, but I enjoyed it.

Re: I am building a cloud

#223

> 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.

Depends. For personal projects, yeah definitely. But at work? Typically the “Platform” team can only afford to support 1 (maybe 2) ways of deployment, and k8s is quite versatile, so even if you need 1 small service, you’ll go with the self-service-k8s approach your Platform team offers. Because the alternative is for you (or your team) to own the whole infrastructure stack for your new deloyment model (ecs? lambda? Whatever): so you need to setup service accounts, secret paths, firewalls, security, pipelines, registries, and a large etc. And most likely, no one will give you access rights for all of that , and your PM won’t accept the overhead either.

So having everyone use the same deployment model (and that’s typically k8s) saves effort. I don’t like it for sure

Re: I am building a cloud

#224
post #73
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…

> I don't understand why we are so obsessed with cranking out even more... the obvious usecase for LLMs should be to write better software I honestly think this is ideal. Video games aside, I think one day we'll look back and realize just how insane it was that we built software for millions or even billions of users to use. People can now finally build the software that does exactly what they've wanted their softwar…

I don't think this will be true for average consumers. Perhaps for nerds like us, who enjoy a bit of tinkering and can put up with weird behaviors. I mean, are you envisioning that everyone would have their own custom messaging app, for example? Or email? Or banking app? I mean, I think most people's demands for those things are all extremely homogenous. I want messages to arrive, I want emails to get spam filtered a little but not too much, and I want my bank to only allow me to log in and see my balances, etc.

I could see maybe more customization of said software, but not totally fresh. I do agree that people will invent more one-off throwaway software, though.

Re: I am building a cloud

#226
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.

Re: I am building a cloud

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this nature of every dedicated server? You also take on the hardware management burden - that's why they can be insanely cheap. But there is middleground in form of VPS, where hardware is managed by the provider. It's still way way cheaper than some cloud magic service.

VPS comes at the cost of potential for oversubscription - even from more reputable vendors. You never really know if you're actually getting what you're paying for.

They also offer dedicated VPS with guaranteed resource allocation.

Re: I am building a cloud

#228

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.

Well, you gotta take all that into consideration before your build out.

You can use block storage if data matters to you.

Many services do not need to care about data reliability or can use multiple nodes, network storage or many other HA setups.

Re: I am building a cloud

#229
AWS. Months of complex dev work to build using their CDK. Terrible disk speed. Frustrating permissions systems. Tiny deployments that take 30 minutes. Rollbacks that get stuck for hours. What you end up with is about 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM for $1000+ per month. No wonder Bezos could send his wife and Katie Perry on a jolly into space. The world's richest man 1 IOP at a time.

For that money I can get 5 big bare metal boxes on OVH with fast SSDs, put k0s on them, fast deploy with kluctl, cloudflare tunnels for egress. Backups to a cheap S3 bucket somewhere. I'll never look at another cloud provider.

Re: I am building a cloud

#230
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Did you improve the security concerns? E.g the way it executes in a `curl | bash` level. I was a bit concerned about that.

TBF, the documentation says you can download and review the script, then run it. Or use other methods like a homebrew or (unofficial) Debian package, or you can just install the binary where you want it, which is all the install.sh script (107 lines, 407 words) does.

https://uncloud.run/docs/getting-started/install-cli/#instal...

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