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Comments (131)

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  dajonker
  > 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 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.
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  stingraycharles
  Potentially useful context: OP is one of the cofounders of Tailscale.> 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.
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  clktmr
  > 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 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.
• sahil-shubham
  The point about VMs being the wrong shape because they’re tied to CPU/memory resonates hard. The abstraction forces you to pay for time, not work.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.
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  farfatched
  Nice post. exe.dev is a cool service that I enjoyed.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.
• socketcluster
  Virtual machines are the wrong abstraction. Anyone who has worked with startups knows that average developers cannot produce secure code. If average developers are incapable of producing secure code, why would average non-technical vibe-coders be able to? They don't know what questions to ask. There's no way vibe coders can produce secure backend software with or without AI. The average software that AI is trained on is insecure. If the LLM sees a massive pile of fugly vibe-coded spaghetti and you tell it "Make it secure please", it immediately will turn into a game of Whac-a-Mole. Patch a vulnerability and two new ones appear. IMO, the right solution is to not allow vibe-coders to access the backend. It is beyond their capabilities to keep it secure, reliable and scalable, so don't make it their responsibility. I refuse to operate a platform where a non-technical user is "empowered" to build their own backend from scratch. It's too easy to blame the user for building insecure software. But IMO, as a platform provider, if you know that your target users don't have the capability to produce secure software, it's your fault; you're selling them footguns.
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  celrenheit
  Shameless plug: https://clawk.work/`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.
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  faangguyindia
  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 why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.
• nopurpose
  From the linked blog post:> 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/monthSo 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.
• tee-es-gee
  I will follow this one for sure. There are a few more companies with the extremely ambitious goal of "a better AWS", and I am interested in the various strategies they take to approach that goal incrementally.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.
• boesboes
  I have mixed feelings about this concept, I agree that the way clouds work now is far from great and stronger abstractions are possible. But this article offers nothing of the sort, it just handwaves 'we solve some problem and that saves you tokens'???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?
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  qxmat
  Europe is crying out for sovereign clouds. If this is to be a viable alt cloud, US jurisdiction is a no.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
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  zackify
  That's insane funding so congrats.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.
• _nhh
  just take a look at hetzner cloud. Its everything 99% of the people need, good pricing. Convert that ux to terminal and you done
• bedstefar
  This looks like an excellent platform for running a "homelab" in the cloud (no, the irony is not lost on me) for lighter stuff like Readeck, Calibre-web, Immich. Maybe even Home Assistant too if we can find a way (Tailscale?) to get the mDNS/multicast traffic tunnelled.
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  st-keller
  Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!
• sroussey
  > 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.Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.
• sudo_cowsay
  I'm still new to cloud computing. I've only ever used linode. What is this supposed to be? I couldn't figure out a specific design through the article well. Pls help
• k9294
  That's really cool!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.
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  pjc50
  The "one price" is oddly small for a cloud company. I'm sure it's nice and fast but the $20/mo seems smaller than some companies' free tiers, especially for disk.The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.
• esher
  Much respect for the ambitous plan, I wish I could do such bold thinking. I am running a small PHP PaaS (fortrabbit) for more than 10 years. For me, it's not only "scratch your own itch", but also "know your audience". So, a limited feature set with a high level of abstraction can also be useful for some users > clear path.
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  qaq
  With LLMs there is no real dev velocity penalty of using high perf. langs like say Rust. A pair of 192 Core AMD EPYC boxes will have enough headroom for 99.9% of projects.
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  ianpurton
  I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?
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  47872324
  exe.dev. 111 IN A 52.35.87.13452.35.87.134 <- Amazon Technologies Inc. (AT-88-Z)
• tamimio
  > $20/month for your VMs>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.
• import
  Article doesn’t really tell what fundamental problems will be solved, except fancy VM allocation. Nothing about hardware, networking, reliability, tooling and such. Well, nice, good luck.
• speedgoose
  I welcome the initiative but it’s pretty costly compared to the bare metal cloud providers. So the value as to be the platform as service too.
• Growtika
  Congrats. Just checked your homepage. I love the fact you also show this comment"That must be worst website ever made"Made me love the site and style even more
• achille
  What will happen to my "Grandfathered Plan" I signed up to test it, don't recall if I gave you my credit card
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  z3t4
  You can run several VM's or containers with isolation on your phone hardware, why even use the cloud when you just want to show your friends?
• Razengan
  Isn't it high time to figure out a distributed physical layer / swarm internet or whatever the buzzword is? Would be perfect for distributed AI too..
• kjok
  How difficult is it to build a second startup on the side?
• jeffrallen
  So much good stuff is happening at https://exe.dev, keep it up guys!
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  poly2it
  Why is an imperative SSH interface a better way of setting cloud resources than something like OpenTofu? In my experience humans and agents work better in declarative environments. If an OpenTofu integration is offered in the future, will exe.dev offer any value over existing cost-effective VPS providers like Hetzner? Technically, Hetzner, for example, also allows you to set up shared disk volumes: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?
• pelasaco
  Such statement is so off:"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.
• troupo
  Did... did you just scare Microsoft? They now announced a similar thing https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2047033636923568440
• rambambram
  Now that we're talking about clouds... what happened to the word 'webhosting'?
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  vasco
  I know its a personal blog but the writing style is really full of himself. What a martyr, starting a second company.
• jrflowers
  > 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.> $160/month 50 VM 25 GB disk+ 100 GB data transfer+ 100GB/mo is <1mbps sustained lmao
• handsometong
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• asiffareed
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• ZihangZ
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• hani1808
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• anon
  undefined
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  WhereIsTheTruth
  > 100 GB data transfer+> $20 a month2025 or 2005, what's the difference?