Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Exe.dev

exe.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 316 posts

Re: Exe.dev

#21

Post by mcny »

crawshaw wrote: post #13
satiric wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I feel like I expect home pages to contain at least a modicum of information. And three seconds spent thinking about accessibility would have told them that light gray links on a white background are a terrible idea...

Apologies for the vagueness of the home page, we were not expecting to be here today. There is a little more info in our first blog post https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev and docs, but far needs to be written. (We have also built some interesting tech behind this that we are excited to write up, I have a doc two pages long of blog posts we want to write.)

The blog doesn't work on Firefox on Android for me

https://blog.exe.dev/meet-exe.dev

Secure Connection Failed

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

Re: Exe.dev

#22

Post by DoctorOW »

j0lol wrote: post #18

Other than a quick boot, what separates this from going on a VPS provider and spinning up servers?

Simpler and easier seems to be the answer. How much does it cost to spread 8gbs RAM across some VMs? Most providers require additional of how many VMs over how many hours, what the specs kf each are specifically, etc. Then once you have it you're setting up an SSH key or shared password depending on use and they make the authentication simpler as well. Maybe wouldn't be great for a huge business but it's you just wanted the ability to play with an isolated server, it might be worth it.

Re: Exe.dev

#23

Post by aleksandrm »

Alifatisk wrote: post #3

> exe.dev is a subscription service that gives you virtual machines, with persistent disks

Thanks, I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong. The front page is just... not helpful. Given the amount of pushbash how everyone feels about this, it should be removed from HN frontpage!

Re: Exe.dev

#24

Post by jauntywundrkind »

JohnMakin wrote: post #6

The description of authentication mechanism is confusing me. it’s over ssh, but how is this integrated? > Private by default, share with discord-style links exe.dev takes care of TLS and auth for you. By default only you can reach your HTTP services, and you have easy mechanims to share them with friends and colleagues. Is anyone with access to a link able to get in?

You ssh in with any key, and it asks you for an email to verify. You're then at a exe.dev console.

There are a couple different link patterns:

  exe.dev ▶ doc sharing
  Sharing (sharing) - press q to exit
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  You can share your VM's HTTP port (see the http proxy documentation /proxy) with your friends. There are three mechanisms:                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  1. Make the HTTP proxy public with share set-public . To point the proxy                                                                                                                                                                   
  at a different port inside the VM, run share port   first.                                                                                                                                                                           
  Marking it public lets anyone access the server without logging in.                                                                                                                                                                            
  2. Add specific e-mail addresses using share add  . This will                                                                                                                                                                       
  send the recipient an e-mail. They can then log into exe.dev with that e-mail,                                                                                                                                                                 
  and access https://vmname.exe.xyz/.                                                                                                                                                                                                            
  3. Create a share link with share add-link . The generated                                                                                                                                                                                 
  link will allow anyone access to the page, after they register and login.                                                                                                                                                                      
  Revoking the link (which can be done with the remove-link command)                                                                                                                                                                             
  does not revoke their access, but you can remove users who are already                                                                                                                                                                         
  part of the share using share remove  .

Re: Exe.dev

#26

Post by MontyCarloHall »

The individual plan says:

— $20/month

— 25 VMs

— 2 CPUs

— 8GB RAM

— 25GB disk

— 100GB bandwidth

Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM.

If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and bandwidth), and I'm not sure what the exe.dev value proposition is. (I'm also not sure why one would want to split 25 VMs across so few shared CPUs/such little memory.)

Re: Exe.dev

#27

Post by jauntywundrkind »

crawshaw wrote: post #8
ilaksh wrote: post #5

Are they actually VMs, or are they containers? Some kind of special container like gvisor? Firecracker microvms?

Hello, an exe.dev person here. They are VMs, on a crosvm-derived VMM. So I consider them "actually VMs", though we do not currently support custom kernels. You can do VM things in there, like create TUN devices, etc.

Not super important to me (and you state explicitly it may change) but your docs are a little out of date here, I think. crosvm versus Cloud Hypervisor / Kata Containers, is, I think, different?

  exe.dev ▶ doc how-exedev-works
  How exe.dev works (how-exedev-works) - press q to exit
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  You're an engineer. We're engineers. Let's talk about what's going on under the hood.                                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  An "exe.dev" VM runs on a bare metal machine that exe.dev rents. We happen to use Kata Containers and Cloud Hypervisor, but that's a bit of an implementation detail (and may change!).                                                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  With most providers, your VM starts with a "base image" and is given a block device. Exe.dev instead starts with a container image (by default, "exeuntu"), and hooks up an overlay filesystem to the VM. This makes creating a new VM         
  take about two seconds. In exchange, we lose some flexibility: you don't get to choose which filesystem you're using, nor which kernel you're using.                                                                                           
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
  On the networking side, we don't give your VM its own public IP. Instead, we terminate HTTPS/TLS requests, and proxy them securely to your VM's web servers. For SSH, we handle ssh vmname.exe.xyz.

Re: Exe.dev

#28

Post by wmf »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

The individual plan says: — $20/month — 25 VMs — 2 CPUs — 8GB RAM — 25GB disk — 100GB bandwidth Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM. If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and band…

The value proposition appears to be CLI cred.

Re: Exe.dev

#29

Post by sickcodebruh »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

The individual plan says: — $20/month — 25 VMs — 2 CPUs — 8GB RAM — 25GB disk — 100GB bandwidth Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM. If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and band…

The docs remark “VMs share the resources allocated to the user” so I interpret as resources allocated to your account, VMs provisioned within those limits.

Re: Exe.dev

#30

Post by crawshaw »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

The individual plan says: — $20/month — 25 VMs — 2 CPUs — 8GB RAM — 25GB disk — 100GB bandwidth Is this 2 CPUs/8GB RAM per VM (in other words, 50 CPUs/200GB RAM)? If so, this is an unbelievable bargain (too good to be true?); other cloud providers charge hundreds of dollars per month for an equivalent VM. If, OTOH, it's 2 CPUs/8GB total, Hetzner offers an equivalent VM for about $5/month (with much more disk and band…

No I apologize for the confusion (exe.dev person here). What is different about this service is you get dedicated resources that you share between your VMs. The initial allocation is conservative, we want to give people more (or drop the price).

The goal is to reduce the marginal cost of creating a VM to zero. Instead of installing a container manager or using Unix users, just make another VM.

(I will get a better version of this table online tonight.)

Post reply on HN