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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

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Re: I am building a cloud

#351

Post by moralestapia »

Tangential.

Is there a name for this style of writing? I come across it regularly.

I'd describe it as forcefully modest, "I'm just a simple guy" kind of thing. With a dash of "still a child on the inside". I always picture it as if the guy from the King of Queens meme wrote it.

"I guess I'm just really into books, heh" - Bezos (obviously non-real, hypothetical quote, meant to illustrate the concept)

This style is also very prevalent in Twitter bios.

Since it's a "literary" style that is quite common, I'm sure it has been characterized and named.

GPT says it's "aw-shucks", but I think that's a different thing.

Re: I am building a cloud

#352

Post by [deleted] »

aliasxneo wrote: post #335

There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall…

[deleted]

Re: I am building a cloud

#353

Post by kelvinjps10 »

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…

maybe it will be something like excel where people have their custom workflows

Re: I am building a cloud

#354

Post by duped »

mrweasel wrote: post #95
Manfred wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.

In some sense I'm starting to think it has more to do with accounting. Hardware, datacenters and software licenses (unless it's a subscription, which is probably is these days) are capital expenses, cloud is an operation expense. Management in a lot of companies hates capital expenditures, presumable because it forces long term thinking, i.e. three to five years for server hardware. Better to go the cloud route and h…

Something I know nothing about is whether the depreciation on server hardware outpaces the value it creates for a business, creating a tax incentive to own your own metal.

Re: I am building a cloud

#355

Post by aliasxneo »

radlad wrote: post #338
aliasxneo wrote: post #335

There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall…

The complaints I see about Kubernetes are typically more about one of two things: (a) this looks complex to learn, and I don't have a need for it - existing deployment patterns solve my use case, or (b) Kubernetes is much less inefficient than running software on bare-metal (energy or cost.) Usually they go hand in hand.

Which is an interesting perspective, considering I've led a platform based on Kubernetes running on company-owned bare-metal. I was actually hired because developers were basically revolting at leaving the cloud because of all the "niceties" they add (in exchange for that hefty cloud tax) which essentially go away on bare-metal. The existing DevOps team was baffled why the developers didn't like when they were handed a plain Ubuntu VM and told to deploy their stack on it.

By the time I left, the developers didn't really know anything about how the underlying infrastructure worked. They wrote their Dockerfiles, a tiny little file to declare their deployment needs, and then they opened a platform webpage to watch the full lifecycle.

If you're a single service shop, then yeah, put Docker Compose on it and run an Ansible playbook via GitHub Actions. Done. But for a larger org moving off cloud to bare-metal, I really couldn't see not having k8s there to help buffer some of the pain.

Re: I am building a cloud

#356

Post by otterley »

sahil-shubham wrote: post #131

The point about VMs being the wrong shape because they’re tied to CPU/memory resonates hard. The abstraction forces you to pay for time, not work. I ended up buying a cheap auctioned Hetzner server and using my self-hostable Firecracker orchestrator on top of it ( https://github.com/sahil-shubham/bhatti , https://bhatti.sh ) specifically because I wanted the thing he’s describing — buy some hardware, carve it into as…

This looks interesting at first blush.

My only feedback so far is that a lot of the documentation, though thorough and useful, looks clearly AI-written. That's not bad in and of itself, but it could be more concise. I especially love the "design decisions" section as I learned something new already.

Have you posted it on "Show HN" already? If not, you should.

Re: I am building a cloud

#357

Post by bloppe »

radlad wrote: post #338
aliasxneo wrote: post #335

There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall…

The complaints I see about Kubernetes are typically more about one of two things: (a) this looks complex to learn, and I don't have a need for it - existing deployment patterns solve my use case, or (b) Kubernetes is much less inefficient than running software on bare-metal (energy or cost.) Usually they go hand in hand.

It can be inefficient because controllers (typically ~40 per cluster) can maintain big caches of resource metadata, and kubelet and kube-proxy usually operate pretty tight while-loops. But such things can be tuned and I don't really consider those issues. The main issue I've actually encountered is that etcd doesn't scale

Re: I am building a cloud

#358

Post by indigodaddy »

radlad wrote: post #348
shimman wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me old fashion but I prefer tools like Dokploy that make deployment across different VPS extremely easy. Dokploy allows me to utilize my home media server, using local instances of forgejo to deploy code, to great effect. k8s appears to be a corporate welfare jobs program where trillion dollar multinational monopolistic companies are the only ones who can collectively spend 100s of millions sustaining. Since mos…

Just as a quick aside, I tried Coolify, Dokploy, Dockge, and Komodo, and if you're trying to do a Heroku-style PaaS, Dokploy is really good. Hands down the best UX for delivering apps & databases. It's too bad about the licensing. (e.g. OIDC + audit logs behind a paid enterprise license.) Coolify is full of features, but the UX suffers and they had a nasty breaking bug at one point (related to Traefik if you want to…

I use Cosmos Cloud on a free 24g oracle VM. Nice UI, solid system

Re: I am building a cloud

#359

Post by aliasxneo »

abustamam wrote: post #341
aliasxneo wrote: post #335

There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall…

Good insight. It's always easy to blame that which you don't understand. I know nothing about k8s, and my eyes kinda glaze over when our staff engineer talks about pods and clusters. But it works for our team, even if not everyone understands it. When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. And the people with axes are wondering how (or indeed even why) so many people are trying to chop wo…

Yeah, I would attribute that to tribalism. There's an intense amount of dogma in the Kubernetes community, likely stemming from the billions of dollars that get fed into the ecosystem by Big Tech. I genuinely think people adopt it as part of their identity and then become hostile to anyone who "doesn't understand the excellence of Kubernetes." I only say this because I've had many lunch time conversations with random strangers at the various KubeCon conferences I've attended - and let's just say some were pretty eye opening.

Re: I am building a cloud

#360

Post by amusingimpala75 »

umvi wrote: post #318
amusingimpala75 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but NixOS does all of these things already, without the process overhead

Even the minimal SBOM part? It's hard to be more minimal than a busybox binary.

That’s fair, NixOS avoids the direct stuff from Docker itself but if you’re basing on an Alpine image or something that would probably be more minimal / smaller
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