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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

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Re: I am building a cloud

#421

Post by moooo99 »

skybrian wrote: post #56
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…

Sometimes “better” means “customized for my specific use case.” I expect that there will be a lot of custom software that never appears in any app store.

Customization often turns out to be a long term liability. Funnily enough, my employer learned this 20 years ago with our ERP and we are still paying the price.

Re: I am building a cloud

#422

Post by zamadatix »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #170
torginus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>3000 IOPS If that's true, I wonder if this is a deliberate decision by cloud providers to push users towards microservice architectures with proprietary cloud storage like S3, so you can't do on-machine dbs even for simple servers.

It's probably a combination of high density storage nodes getting I/O bound and SSDs having finite write endurance. Anything that improves the first problem costs them money to improve it and then makes the second problem worse, and the second one costs them money again, so why would they want to make the default something that costs then more twice if most people don't need it? Instead they make the default "meager…

How often is the storage in cloud providers even local vs how often are laptops doing anything other than raw access to a single local disk with a basic FS?

I remember my worked laptop's IOPS beating a single VM on the first SSD based SAN I deployed as well. Of course, the SAN scaled well beyond it with 1,000 VMs.

Re: I am building a cloud

#424

Post by moooo99 »

mattbee wrote: post #189
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 founded a hosting company 25 years ago when User-Mode Linux was the hot new virtualisation tech. We aspired to just replicate the dedicated server experience because that was obviously how you deploy services with the most flexibility, and UML made it so cheap! Through the 2010s I (extremely wrongly) assumed that being metered on each little part of their stack was not something most developers would choose, for th…

> And Hetzner gives you almost all of that economic upside while taking away much of the physical hassle! Why are they not kings of the hosting world, rather than turning over a modest €367M (2021).

Hetzner is an oldschool German company, it is not surprising to see them act this way. They are very profitable (165M Euro in 2024) and have very little debt. They also seem to be mostly bootstrapped and are not VC funded

https://www.northdata.com/Hetzner%20Online%20GmbH,%20Gunzenh...

Re: I am building a cloud

#425

Post by Abby_101 »

Half the work of pricing a solo SaaS is modeling what a bad month looks like if egress or IOPS spike. You end up pricing defensively to protect against your own infra bill instead of pricing to the value you provide. A fixed bucket of compute with clear limits is way easier to build a business on than a meter that could run anywhere.

Re: I am building a cloud

#426

Post by bananamogul »

capitol_ wrote: post #331
Thanemate wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that "resume-driven development" exists, where the tradeoffs between approaches aren't about the technical fit of the solution but the career trajectory. I've seen people making plain workstation preparation scripts using Rust, only to have something to flex about in interviews. I'm not surprised even in the slightest that DevOps workers will slap k8s on everything, to show "real industry experience" in a job…

Your first example sound very sensible to me? Using new technology in something small and unimportant like a setup script is a perfect way to experiment and learn. It would be irresponsible to build something important as the first thing you do in a new language.

For your own use, yes.

But if you're working with others, you should default to using standard industry tools (absent a compelling reason not to) because your work will be handed off to others and passed on to new team members. It's unreasonable to expect that a new Windows or Linux sysadmin or desktop support tech must learn Rust to maintain a workstation setup workflow.

Re: I am building a cloud

#427

Post by firesteelrain »

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.

We have a hobby web based app that consists of multiple containers. It runs in docker compose. Serves 1000 users right now (runs 24/7). Single VM.

No Kubernetes whatsoever.

I agree with you.

Re: I am building a cloud

#428

Post by mynameisash »

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…

My first and really only experience with Kubernetes was a project I did about six years ago. I was tasked with building a thing that did some lightly distributed compute using Python + Dask. I was able to cobble together a functioning (internal) product, and we went to production.

Not long after, I found that the pods were CONSTANTLY getting into some weird state where K8s couldn't rebuild, so I had to forcibly delete the pods and rebuild. I blamed myself, not knowing much about K8s, but it also was extremely frustrating because, as I understood/understand it, the entire purpose of Kubernetes is to ensure a reliable deployment of some combination of pods. If it couldn't do that and instead I had to manually rebuild my cluster, then what was the point?

In the end, I ended up nuking the entire project -- K8s, Docker containers, Python, and Dask -- and instead went with a single Rust binary deployed to an Azure Function. The result was faster (by probably an order of magnitude), less memory, cheaper (maybe -80% cost), and much more reliable (I think around four nines).

Re: I am building a cloud

#429

Post by pbronez »

messh wrote: post #368

There are plenty of alternatives out there. I built https://shellbox.dev , which gives you instant vms via ssh where unlike exe you pay only for what you use-- scale to zero. It is also regular linux, supporting vscode and zed remote, Nested virtualization, etc. If you're looking to invest im fine with only $5M :)

Neat service. Website doesn't provide enough information for me to trust any workloads to it. Not clear where the underlying infrastructure is, what security guarantees I get, etc.

Re: I am building a cloud

#430

Post by linuxftw »

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.

You're not missing anything. There's legions of amateurs that dislike k8s because they don't understand the value.
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