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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

Not sure we can move away from cpu/memory/io budgeting towards total metal saturation because code isn't what it used to be because no one handles malloc failure any more, we just crash OOM

`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.

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 many VMs as I want, and not think about provisioning or their lifecycle. Idle VMs snapshot to disk and free all RAM automatically. The hardware is mine, the VMs are disposable, and idle costs nothing.

The thing that, although obvious, surprised me most is that once you have memory-state snapshots, everything becomes resumable. I make a browser sandbox, get Chromium to a logged-in state, snapshot it, and resume copies of that session on demand. My agents work inside sandboxes, I run docker compose in them for preview environments, and when nothing’s active the server is basically idle. One $100/month box does all of it.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641378

Checking the current offering, it's just prepaid cloud-capacity with rather low flexibility. It's cheap though, so that is nice I guess. But does this solve anything new? Anything fly.io orso doesn't solve?

What is the new idea here? Or is it just the vibes?

Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.

A service offering VMs for $20 is a long way from AWS, but I see how it makes sense as a first step. AWS also started with EC2, but in a completely different environment with no competition.

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.

> Finally, clouds have painful APIs. This is where projects like K8S come in, papering over the pain so engineers suffer a bit less from using the cloud.

K8s's main function isn't to paint over existing cloud APIs, that is just necessity when you deploy it in cloud. On normal hardware it's just an orchestration layer, and often just a way to pass config from one app to another in structured format.

> But VMs are hard with Kubernetes because the cloud makes you do it all yourself with lumpy nested virtualization.

Man discovered system designed for containers is good with containers, not VMs. More news at 10

> Disk is hard because back when they were designing K8S Google didn’t really even do usable remote block devices, and even if you can find a common pattern among clouds today to paper over, it will be slow.

Ignorance. k8s have abstractions over a bunch of types of storage, for example using Ceph as backend will just use KVM's Ceph backend, no extra overhead. It also supports "oldschool" protocols used for VM storage like NFS or iSCSI. It might be slow in some cases for cloud if cloud doesn't provide enough control, but that's not k8s fault.

> Networking is hard because if it were easy you would private link in a few systems from a neighboring open DC and drop a zero from your cloud spend.

He mistakes cloud problems with k8s problems(again). All k8s needs is visibility between nodes. There are multiple providers to achieve that, some with zero tunelling, just routing. It's still complex, but no more than "run a routing daemon".

I expect his project to slowly reinvent cloud APIs and copying what k8s and other projects did once he starts hitting problems those solutions solved. And do it worse, because instead of researching of why and why not that person seems to want to throw everything out with learning no lessons.

Do not give him money

52.35.87.134 <- Amazon Technologies Inc. (AT-88-Z)

>One price, no surprises. You get 2 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of disk—shared across up to 25 VMs.

This might sounds like a good thing compared to the current state of clouds, but what’s better than that is having your own. The other day I got a used optiplex for $20, it had 2TB hdd, 265gb ssd, 16gb, and corei7. This is a one time payment, not monthly. You can setup proxmox, have dozens of lxc and vm, and even nest inside them whatever more lxc too, your hardware, physically with you, backed up by you, monitored by you, and accessed only by you. If you have stable internet and electricity, there’s really no excuse not to invest on your own hardware. A small business can even invest in that as well, not just as a personal one. Go to rackrat.net and grab a used server if you are a business, or a good station for personal use.

"That must be worst website ever made"

Made me love the site and style even more

> The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center.

From the exe.dev pricing page:

> additional data transfer $0.07/GB/month

So at least on the network price promise they don't seem to deliver, still costs an arm and a leg like your neighbourhood hyperscaler.

Overall service looks interesting, I like simplicity with convenience, something which packet.net deliberately decided not to offer at the time.

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?

And what it has to do with the "cloud"? Cloud means one use cloud-provided services - security, queue, managed database, etc. and that's their selling point. This exe.dev is a bare server where I can install what I want, this is fine, but this is not a cloud and, frankly speaking, nothing new.

"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.

> $160/month

  50 VM
  25 GB disk+
  100 GB data transfer+

> $20 a month

2025 or 2005, what's the difference?