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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

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Re: I am building a cloud

#271

Post by staticassertion »

bfivyvysj wrote: post #99
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 thought we collectively learned this with stack overflows engineering blog years ago. Scale vertically until you can't because you're unlikely to hit a limit and if you do you'll have enough money to pay someone else to solve it. Docker is amazing development tooling but it makes for horrible production infrastructure.

This is why there's an endless cycle of shitty SaaS with slow APIs and high downtime. People keep thinking that scale is something you can just add later.

Re: I am building a cloud

#272

Post by dnnddidiej »

BirAdam wrote: post #247
mkj wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is docker a context switch overhead? It's the same processes running on the same kernel.

You're adding all of the other supporting processes within the container that needn't be replicated.

Sidecars? Not in a simple app.

Re: I am building a cloud

#273

Post by dobreandl »

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…

We've reduced our costs on Hetzner to about 10% on what we've paid on Heroku, for 10x performance. Kamal really kicks ass, and you can have a pretty complicated infrastructure up in no time. We're using terraform, ansible + kamal for deploys, no issues whatsoever.

Re: I am building a cloud

#274

Post by staticassertion »

BirAdam wrote: post #231
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…

So... if you're at the point where you're using a single VM, I have to ask why bother with docker at all? You're paying a context switch overhead, memory overhead, and disk overhead that you do not need to. Just make an image of the VM in case you need to drop it behind an LB.

There's one extra process that takes up a tiny bit of CPU and memory. For that, you get an immutable host, simple configuration, a minimal SBOM, a distributable set of your dependencies, x-platform for dev, etc.

Re: I am building a cloud

#275

Post by jcgrillo »

hkt wrote: post #157
goombaskoop wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the average devops knows k8s and will slap it onto anything they see This is certainly the case from all the third person accounts I hear. Online. I never actually met a single one that is like that, if anything, those same people are the ones that are first to tell me about their Hetzner setups.

DevOps here. The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing depar…

> Management very often trust the sales and marketing departments of big vendors more than their own staff.

They're getting kickbacks from cloud vendors. Prove me wrong.

Re: I am building a cloud

#276

Post by woeirua »

edot wrote: post #224
cush wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think you’re glossing over a lot of use cases. For example, I want my email’s spam controls much tighter.

Re: I am building a cloud

#277

Post by vladvasiliu »

hkt wrote: post #157
goombaskoop wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the average devops knows k8s and will slap it onto anything they see This is certainly the case from all the third person accounts I hear. Online. I never actually met a single one that is like that, if anything, those same people are the ones that are first to tell me about their Hetzner setups.

DevOps here. The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing depar…

> If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing departments of big vendors more than their own staff. Many of us have given up fighting this, because what it comes down to is a massive asymmetry of information and trust.

I think this is the crux of the matter. Also, "everybody is doing it, so they must be right" is also a very common way of thinking amongst this population.

Re: I am building a cloud

#278

Post by jcgrillo »

nz wrote: post #246
hkt wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps here. The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing depar…

The following happened to a friend. Around the time of the pandemic, a company wanted to make some Javascript code do a kind of transformation over large number of web-pages (a billion or so, fetched as WARC files from the web archive). Their engineers suggested setting up SmartOS VMs and deploying Manta (which would have allowed the use of the Javascript code in a totally unmodified way -- map-reduce from the comman…

There was a moment ca. 2020 when everyone was losing their minds over Lambda and other cloud services like SQS and S3 because they're "so cheap!!11". Innumeracy is a hell of a drug.

Re: I am building a cloud

#279

Post by qudat »

dgb23 wrote: post #57
isoprophlex wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sobering comment for all the little people like myself who dream of owning a business based on a vision of cool tech that just does what it promises (as opposed to all the corporate shovelware out there)

You can still do that. Not every business needs to be a hyperscaling startup.

Agreed! Over at https://pico.sh we are chugging along and having a blast. Profitable but at a scale that is manageable for us. Cheers

Re: I am building a cloud

#280

Post by joshgel »

ndr wrote: post #196

exe.dev landing page is sublime. The call to action is "ssh exe.dev" and you can bet it works.

I love the line on the landing page with a link back to hn:

> That must be worst website ever made.

the level of confidence (this is a second time founder after all) to put that on their website gives me confidence that they can make this work

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