I am building a cloud

> 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.

I have trouble seeing how this is different to linode, if i invest time in a new VM api, this has to work for cloud or my own machines transparently. Lastly as much as i share the disappointment in k8s promise, this seems a bit too simple, there is a reason homelabs mostly standardised on compose files.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

I have had an eye on this for a while (found via pi.dev) but I don't really have a solid use case for it, but the idea/concept of is appealing where the price is not. I can buy a £100-150 mini-pc with better hardware to run 24/7 for my own VMs extending my homelab (granted my ISP doesn't put any restrictions on me, I know many others can't say the same).

You can see their base docker image here - https://github.com/boldsoftware/exeuntu

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!

AWS. Months of complex dev work to build using their CDK. Terrible disk speed. Frustrating permissions systems. Tiny deployments that take 30 minutes. Rollbacks that get stuck for hours. What you end up with is about 4 CPUs and 16Gb of RAM for $1000+ per month. No wonder Bezos could send his wife and Katie Perry on a jolly into space. The world's richest man 1 IOP at a time.

For that money I can get 5 big bare metal boxes on OVH with fast SSDs, put k0s on them, fast deploy with kluctl, cloudflare tunnels for egress. Backups to a cheap S3 bucket somewhere. I'll never look at another cloud provider.

> 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.

You should do it in Europe, so much demand for European clouds and very weak offerings.

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?

Wondering what runtime is the infra under the hood. Firecracker? Traditional VM? Docker Containers?

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.

I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?

I think clouds pay a huge abstraction penalty to allow tiny VMs. I guess it helps with onboarding and $10 personal VPNs. But I have never needed a fraction of a computer. I want to rent some number of full computers of various sizes, consisting of CPU, memory, and flash disk. Hetzner is closer than AWS, and I think/hope that’s what Crawshaw is aiming for.

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.

Have we already forgotten about the NSA's "SSL added and removed here! :)" slide that Snowden showed us?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

exe.dev. 111 IN A 52.35.87.134

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

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.

Very cool signup!

Thank you, but no thanks

just take a look at hetzner cloud. Its everything 99% of the people need, good pricing. Convert that ux to terminal and you done

The author seems to have no clue what is cloud problem, and what is k8s problem, and is blaming everything on k8s. The whole post reeks of ignorance. I have no love to k8s but he is just flat out putting out false information.

> 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

exe.dev landing page is sublime. The call to action is "ssh exe.dev" and you can bet it works.

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.

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

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?

How difficult is it to build a second startup on the side?

What will happen to my "Grandfathered Plan" I signed up to test it, don't recall if I gave you my credit card

> $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.

I mean the whole ebs complaint is invalid you are complaining about a san disk vs local disk. If you want high speed local storage use a d instance with nvme storage.

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?

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/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.

should log the journey down and os it!

So much good stuff is happening at https://exe.dev, keep it up guys!

Did... did you just scare Microsoft? They now announced a similar thing https://x.com/satyanadella/status/2047033636923568440

I know its a personal blog but the writing style is really full of himself. What a martyr, starting a second company.

As someone who has built and managed clouds, good luck to them, you'll need it :)

Now that we're talking about clouds... what happened to the word 'webhosting'?

Ilike to working with reap name

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..

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.

How this is different from getting dedicated server from any other provider? Typically you need to pay a bit more - $40-$50 but you get more RAM and cores.

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.

> 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

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> 100 GB data transfer+

> $20 a month

2025 or 2005, what's the difference?