bojangleslover (u/bojangleslover)

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

kjfarm · 2 days ago

Love that it is in NC! Though, I'm confused who this is for. Is it for genomics data scientists mainly or is it general compute (I would also compare with hetzner and the other clouds if you are going the general compute method). If genomics or data scientists is the main audience, is this going to grow to be more collab notebook plug and play? Very cool and wish you the best!

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

Really it's for both. One of our cofounders came from a genomics background and so that's why we have the Marimo notebooks + R Studio Server + genomics container. But we've also had a lot of requests for general VMs so we made some of those as well.

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

re-thc · 2 days ago

> at which case we owned everything. We had Google Fiber

So you didn’t own everything. Google owned the IPs and network.

It’s the same colocating in that your network providers can be shut down.

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

I guess you're right. Is it even possible to truly own everything yourself? Even if you open your own data center, at some point you have to agree to peer with big fiber providers like Segra, Lumen, AWS Edge Network, right?

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

ilaksh · 2 days ago

The console page is showing third party login failure on my phone after I tried to switch to desktop mode because I couldn't see the create instance form. Also the wrbgl stuff on the home page crashes my Android browser after a few minutes.

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

Did you try to log in with Github or gmail?

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

Lucasoato · 2 days ago

If you’re looking for a cheap but reliable alternative, Hetzner offers i7 64GB Ram servers for as low as 37.45€/month.

Of course you’re not in AWS, forget about all the managed services, but we’re talking about 95%~98% cheaper egress costs, with 20TB included in most machines.

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

We have no egress fees but you're right about Hetzner. They're cheap. We aim to offer more value-added software to make up for it. Also that machine is in Europe, Americans don't like the latency (at least I don't), they have been known to shut people down (within reason).

Also I'm seeing that the most they can go RAM-wise for a dedicated US location is 192G. We go to 512 and will soon go beyond. I'm sure they'll get there soon but that's a consideration as well.

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

handfuloflight · 2 days ago

I'll bite. How much capacity do you have or some examples of the capacity you're managing?

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

We have about 1000 cores right now.

We're really excited for the AMD EPYC Venice — 256 physical cores each -> 512 vCPUs -> 1024 vCPUS on a single board with dual-socket. It will probably be about $40k per machine with these RAM prices but we're definitely going to buy a few. A full data center on a single motherboard!

So we're limited on capacity since we own all our own hardware. Please do not use us for auto-scaling just yet. Our software would have no issue with us linking up other cloud machines such as AWS EC2 to our fleet and offering it there, which could help with auto-scaling, but we would not make any money on that and it would be a lot of engineering effort for us right now.

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

leetrout · 2 days ago

I looked around for reasonable datacenter colo in the triad and triangle and didn't get anything promising. Where are you physically hosting your infra?

Curious if you are having to buy bandwidth as well. Some of the Midwest data centers include over 30TB of bandwidth in the rack rentals.

And if you are willing to go into the details curious how you are handling bare metal provisioning. MaaS or home grown tooling? Or are you just installing proxmox by hand?

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

We don't have on-demand API-based bare metal provisioning right now. Sorry if that is misleading on the website. Our bare metal is OTC right now (over the counter).

For the rest of our provisioning (VM and container) I wrote the software myself. It's based on a Django app called the "master" that hosts the console and keeps track of who has rented what etc + a bunch of "host" nodes that listen for instructions from the "master". Pure python, the only thing that's in Go is the CLI.

I looked into Proxmox but ultimately decided I wanted full control. ZFS storage from Proxmox is something I do sometimes wish we had — going to offer s3-compatible storage very soon but I know Proxmox does ZFS out of the box really well.

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

h33t-l4x0r · 2 days ago

> Some of the cheap European providers have US presence now as well

Not that offer s3-compatible object storage (which I guess is on the roadmap) and Turin VPS. These prices are legit and I'm not pulling the trigger yet but I'm definitely interested.

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

Yes we're going to offer this very soon, we have a bunch of SSDs but we're still deliberating on what to use now that MinIO is moving toward closed source.

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

amhoab · 2 days ago

This is a huge market and there are lots of competitors out there. Just FYI that 1/3 of the AWS price isn't really considered cheap when you look at the budget market. Some of the cheap European providers have US presence now as well. That said, the pricing isn't too bad and the lineup looks good. Also, the website also gives me issues on my Android phone.

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

Landing page or console? We didn't really build our console for mobile though we probably should.

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

tianqi · 2 days ago

I'm very interested in your product. However, I'd like to report a strange phenomenon: whenever I open your website's homepage, although it doesn't seem to use a lot of memory, my Chrome becomes extremely laggy, and afterwards my entire Mac OS becomes very slow. The first time I encountered this, I couldn't determine the cause. I closed all applications and rebooted my computer. After working perfectly for a while, I reopened your website, and my Chrome and OS became almost unresponsive. After rebooting my computer again, without opening any other applications, just Chrome and your website, and it immediately became nearly unresponsive again. Therefore, while I'm not entirely sure, it seems highly related to your website.

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

We fixed this, please try again, also if anyone knows how to run a Three.js shader without exploding people's laptops I am very open to suggestions.

bojangleslover commented on Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads carolinacloud.io/... · Posted by u/bojangleslover

re-thc · 2 days ago

> they can shutdown your account if threats persisted

That problem can NEVER be avoided at any level unless you run absolutely everything (which is almost impossible).

What everyone does is have a system to quickly pass on and also shutdown who's 1 layer down. You receive a report and deal with the client.

> I was interested in building my own cloud

At the end of the day the problem has nothing to do with clouds. It happens everywhere e.g. if you rented out a house and someone did something illegal with it... how do you avoid it? All the same.

bojangleslover · 2 days ago

We actually ran out of my house in our very early stages at which case we owned everything. We had Google Fiber 8gbps for $150/mo. The only issue was the Google Fiber terms of service — ie they could shut us down at any time. This was one reason we went to colocation.