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Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

hakuna.cloud

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Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#11
post #3

Efficiency is an area where there can be a lot of cost hiding. We recently saved a lot of money by: - Using the Kubernetes Vertical Pod Autoscaler ( https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/vertica... ) for CPU and memory scaling, and switching to metrics like requests per second and connection count for horizontal scaling - Collecting metrics on container CPU and memory allocation vs utilization - Writin…

Would love to see a more detailed write-up, if one exists, on your experience. We're nowhere near your scale but will probably ramp up in the next year or so.

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#13
post #8

> Hakuna Cloud is a software-as-a-service HTTPS proxy. You don't need to change existing software or infrastructure, and you don't need to install additional tools on your servers. > Each cloud server must have an FQDN/DNS name configured as a CNAME to our load balancers. > When your server stops receiving requests, it will be stopped. As soon as a new request arrives, Hakuna will start it. Interesting idea. It's lik…

At Hakuna we use our own service to start and stop our Jira and NPM servers; the instances are automatically stopped at night or whenever nobody needs to do `npm install`.

In our use case, the EC2 instance starts in about 50 seconds, with another minute needed to start the Jira service.

We have a demo, deployable directly from our CLI, that starts a Nginx server on an Oracle Cloud instance in less than 40 seconds.

If the instance is being stopped and a new request arrives, it will have to wait shutdown + startup, yes.

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#14
post #7
post #5

Interesting idea. Almost bring the idea of lambda to VMs, doesn't it? Also, how does hakuna work with DO? I thought DO still charges when VMs are powered off?

Hi, I'm a developer at Hakuna. Thank you for the feedback. With DO, we destroy the instance so that nothing is charged for it, and save a snapshot to be used to restart the instance; you pay only for the snapshot storage - $0.05/GB per month.

What is the cold start time of a DO instance image to working VM? Isn't it like 2 minutes?

If a DO droplet for my marketing site cost me $5 per month to run.. I could use your service and save a buck or two, at the risk of a $5000 client timing out on my page as it tries to spin up?

Scaling based on demand is important, but it seems you are better using k8s with some metric based scaling, over trying to hack it on DO?

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#15

I just had a conversation about this product idea a couple days ago. How long before Amazon acquires it and cripples the functionality? Could be a good exit strategy, at least.

I don't think they'd cripple it. Amazon takes a pretty long term view of things. They might well introduce something like this into their load balancer or api gateway though. It'd be nice to have in front of fargate because of the faster cold start times.

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#16
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm a developer at Hakuna. Thank you for the feedback. With DO, we destroy the instance so that nothing is charged for it, and save a snapshot to be used to restart the instance; you pay only for the snapshot storage - $0.05/GB per month.

What is the cold start time of a DO instance image to working VM? Isn't it like 2 minutes? If a DO droplet for my marketing site cost me $5 per month to run.. I could use your service and save a buck or two, at the risk of a $5000 client timing out on my page as it tries to spin up? Scaling based on demand is important, but it seems you are better using k8s with some metric based scaling, over trying to hack it on DO…

I think this is not something you'd use for customer facing services. It's fine for internal stuff of the first employee of the day has to wait two minutes, and it gets shut down at night after it hasn't been used for an hour.

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#17
From the FAQ:

> The HTTPS trigger is intercepting all my traffic? > No, your data are safe if your server support HTTPS protocol. All the data exchanged between your server and your clients is encrypted and not accessible by us.

Unless there's an IP allocated to each user, I don't think this is accurate. With SSL, the HTTP headers are encrypted, so there would be no way to know where know where to route the request without first decrypting the data, and thus having access to the data.

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#18

From the FAQ: > The HTTPS trigger is intercepting all my traffic? > No, your data are safe if your server support HTTPS protocol. All the data exchanged between your server and your clients is encrypted and not accessible by us. Unless there's an IP allocated to each user, I don't think this is accurate. With SSL, the HTTP headers are encrypted, so there would be no way to know where know where to route the request w…

In HTTPS, all the headers are encrypted except the hostname:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

SSL termination is always done on our customers' servers.

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#19
post #13
post #8

> Hakuna Cloud is a software-as-a-service HTTPS proxy. You don't need to change existing software or infrastructure, and you don't need to install additional tools on your servers. > Each cloud server must have an FQDN/DNS name configured as a CNAME to our load balancers. > When your server stops receiving requests, it will be stopped. As soon as a new request arrives, Hakuna will start it. Interesting idea. It's lik…

At Hakuna we use our own service to start and stop our Jira and NPM servers; the instances are automatically stopped at night or whenever nobody needs to do `npm install`. In our use case, the EC2 instance starts in about 50 seconds, with another minute needed to start the Jira service. We have a demo, deployable directly from our CLI, that starts a Nginx server on an Oracle Cloud instance in less than 40 seconds. If…

Thanks.

Is there UI feedback to the user during the wait, or does the browser just show "waiting for response" for the whole time? If a user refreshes the browser a bunch of times during the wait, will the Hakuna proxy give up on those requests or still pass all of them through to the target server?

Re: Hakuna Cloud – Stop cloud servers when they are not in use

#20

I just had a conversation about this product idea a couple days ago. How long before Amazon acquires it and cripples the functionality? Could be a good exit strategy, at least.

2 minute cold start is pretty slow for a lot of use cases... Amazon already built Lambda which is more widely applicable.
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