I am building a cloud (crawshaw.io)

Article summary

The author, a co-founder of a startup, is building a new cloud platform called exe.dev, motivated by their dissatisfaction with current cloud providers' limitations and high costs. They argue that current clouds are constrained by their abstractions, such as VMs tied to CPU and memory resources, and that these limitations lead to poor performance and high costs. The author aims to create a cloud platform that addresses these issues, providing more flexible and cost-effective computing resources. The platform will offer local NVMe storage, anycast networking, and other features to improve performance and usability.

Main themes

• Cloud computing
• Infrastructure costs
• Performance optimization
• Abstraction limitations
• Networking and storage

What commenters say

• Cloud vendors' pricing is often not based on costs, but rather on what customers are willing to pay, which can lead to high margins and limited competition.
• The high cost of cloud storage and bandwidth is a major limitation for many users, and alternative solutions such as local storage and networking can offer better performance and cost-effectiveness.
• Some commenters argue that cloud providers deliberately limit performance to push users towards more expensive services, while others see it as a result of technical limitations and cost constraints.
• Building a better cloud platform requires rethinking the underlying abstractions and architecture, rather than just adding new layers on top of existing ones.
• The use of local NVMe storage and async replication can provide a good balance between performance and redundancy, but also raises concerns about data integrity and recovery.
• The value of a cloud platform lies not just in its technology, but also in its growth metrics, team, and vision, which can attract investment and customers.
• Some users are skeptical about the need for new cloud platforms, citing the existence of alternative solutions and the challenges of building a competitive service.
• The development of new cloud platforms can be driven by the need for more flexible and cost-effective computing resources, as well as the desire to create a better user experience.