FR version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
85% Positive
Analyzed from 3306 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#cloud#software#more#need#don#cost#tailscale#lot#fun#better
Discussion (94 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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 networking layer on top of it.
After spending a lot of time "optimizing" or "hardening" the cluster, cloud spend has doubled or tripled. Incidents have also doubled or tripled, as has downtime. Debugging effort has doubled or tripled as well.
I ended up saying goodbye to those devops folks, nuking the cluster, booted up a single VM with debian, enabled the firewall and used Kamal to deploy the app with docker. Despite having only a single VM rather than a cluster, things have never been more stable and reliable from an infrastructure point of view. Costs have plummeted as well, it's so much cheaper to run. It's also so much easier and more fun to debug.
And yes, a single VM really is fine, you can get REALLY big VMs which is fine for most business applications like we run. Most business applications only have hundreds to thousands of users. The cloud provider (Google in our case) manages hardware failures. In case we need to upgrade with downtime, we spin up a second VM next to it, provision it, and update the IP address in Cloudflare. Not even any need for a load balancer.
People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.
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 development tooling. Not production infrastructure.
> Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack.
I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go: start with great ideals, but as success grows, so must profit.
Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Some services they lose money on, others they profit heavily from. These things are often carefully chosen: the type of costs that only go up when customers are heavily committed—bandwidth, NAT gateway, etc.
But I'm fairly certain OP knows this.
Using fio
Hetzner (cx23, 2vCPU, 4 GB) ~3900 IOPS (read/write) ~15.3 MB/s avg latency ~2.1 ms 99.9th percentile ≈ ~5 ms max ≈ ~7 ms
DigitalOcean (SFO1 / 2 GB RAM / 30 GB Disk) ~3900 IOPS (same!) ~15.7 MB/s (same!) avg latency ~2.1 ms (same!) 99.9th percentile ≈ ~18 ms max ≈ ~85 ms (!!)
using sequential dd
Hetzner: 1.9 GB/s DO: 850 MB/s
Using low end plan on both but this Hetzner is 4 euro and DO instance is $18.
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.
Edit: I posted this before reading, and these two are the same he points out.
And yes, IO typically happens in 4kb blocks, so you need a decent amount of IOPS to get the full bandwidth.
Business 101 teaches us that pricing isn't based on cost. Call it top down vs bottom up pricing, but the first principles "it costs me $X to make a widget, so 1.y * $X = sell the product for $Y is not how pricing works in practice.
The price is what the customer will pay, regardless of your costs.
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 should be to write better software. Let's hope the focus shifts from code generation to something else. There are many ways LLMs can assist in writing better code.
I believe right now we are still in the phase of “how can AI help engineers write better software”, but are slowly shifting to “how can engineers help AI write better software.” This will bring in a new herd of engineers with completely different views on what software is, and how to best go about building computer interactions.
My view is actually the opposite. Software now belongs to cattle, not pet. We should use one-offs. We should use micro-scale snippets. Speaking language should be equivalent to programming. (I know, it's a bit of pipe dream)
In that sense, exe.dev (and tailscale) is a bit like pet-driven projects.
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 software to do without competing priorities and misaligned revenue models working against them. One could argue this kind of software, by definition, is higher quality.
As for the average quality: it’s unclear.
My intuition is that agents lift up the floor to some degree, but at the same time will lead to more software being produced that’s of mediocre quality, with outliers of higher quality emerging at a higher rate than before.
If you're doing anything complicated, Excel just doesn't make sense anymore. it'll still the be data exchange format (at least, something more advanced than csv), but it's no longer the only frontend.
"No one uses" is no longer the insult it once was. I don't need or want to make software for every last person on the world to use. I have a very very small list of users (aka me) that I serve very well with the software that I generate.
I agree there is opportunity in making LLM development flows smooth, paired with the flexibility of root-on-a-Linux-machine.
> Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you.
The irony is that this is my experience of Tailscale.
Finally, networking made easy. Oh god, why is my battery doing so poorly. Oh god, it's modified my firewall rules in a way that's incompatible with some other tool, and the bug tracker is silent. Now I have to understand their implementation, oh dear.
No thank you.
Tags permanently erase the user identity from a device, and disable things like Taildrop. When I tried to assign a tag for ACLs, I found that I then could not remove it and had to endure a very laborous process to re-register a Tailscale device that I added to Tailscale for the express purpose of remotely accessing
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 why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.
All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
Whether or not cloud is viable for a company is very individual. It's very hard to pin point a size or a use case that will always make cloud the "correct" choice.
OP is not saying they push new versions at such a high frequency they need checks every one minute.
The choice of one minute vs 15 minute is implementation detail and when architected like this costs nothing.
I hope that helps. Again this is my own take.
It is like 4 lines of config for Postgres, the only line you need to change is on which path Postgres should store the data.
Maybe change the filesystem?
An employee is going to cost anywhere between 8k and 50k per month. Hiring an employee to save 200/month on servers by using a shitty VPS provider is not saving you any money.
`ssh you/repo/branch@box.clawk.work` → jump directly into Claude Code (or Codex) with your repo cloned and credentials injected. Firecracker VMs, 19€/mo.
POC, please be kind.
Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.
The technology itself in its current form is not valuable
Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.
One thing I'm confused with is how to create a shared resources like e.g. a redis server and connect to it from other vms? It looks now quite cumbersome to setup tailscale or connect via ssh between VMS. Also what about egress? My guess is that all traffic billed at 0.07$ per GB. It looks like this cloud is made to run statefull agents and personal isolated projects and distributed systems or horizontal scaling isn't a good fit for it?
Also I'm curious why not railway like billing per resource utilization pricing model? It’s very convenient and I would argue is made for agents era.
I did setup for my friends and family a railway project that spawns a vm with disk (statefull service) via a tg bot and runs an openclaw like agent - it costs me something like 2$ to run 9 vms like this.
The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.
VMs have a built-in gateway to cloud providers with a fixed url with no auth. You can top that in via the service itself. No need for your own keys.
So likely a good tool for managing AI agents.
And "cloud" is a bit of a stretch, the service is very narrow.
52.35.87.134 <- Amazon Technologies Inc. (AT-88-Z)
https://exe.dev/docs/regions
Hey wait a minute!
"That must be worst website ever made"
Made me love the site and style even more
"In some tech circles, that is an unusual statement. (“In this house, we curse computers!”) I get it, computers can be really frustrating. But I like computers. I always have. It is really fun getting computers to do things. Painful, sure, but the results are worth it. Small microcontrollers are fun, desktops are fun, phones are fun, and servers are fun, whether racked in your basement or in a data center across the world. I like them all."
The reality: Everyone reading his blog or this HN entry loves computers.
https://github.com/hetzneronline/community-content/blob/mast...
It also has a CLI, hcloud. Am I getting any value with exe.dev I couldn't get with an 80 line hcloud wrapper?
For agents, declarative plans are still valuable because they are reviewable. The interesting question is whether exe.dev changes the primitive: resource pools for many isolated VM-like processes, or just nicer VPS provisioning.
- I'm building a server farm in my homelab.
- I'm doing a small startup to see if this idea works.
- We're taking on AWS by being more cost effective. Funding secured.
> $20 a month
2025 or 2005, what's the difference?