umur (u/umur) - Readit News

umur commented on Microsoft Is Dead (2007) paulgraham.com/microsoft.... · Posted by u/aamederen

umur · a year ago

As a side note, and to pg's point, Microsoft did make some very smart Web 2.0 acquisitions from Silicon Valley in the years since --most notably LinkedIn and Github--, and let them run relatively independently.

> So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it: Buy all the good "Web 2.0" startups. They could get substantially all of them for less than they'd have to pay for Facebook.

>Put them all in a building in Silicon Valley, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Redmond.

umur commented on Cloud Virtualization: Red Hat, AWS Firecracker, and Ubicloud internals ubicloud.com/blog/cloud-v... · Posted by u/umur

bonzini · a year ago

Author of "All you need to know about KVM userspace" here! I am happy that you liked it. Some things have changed since then, some have not...

Red Hat is now shipping Kata Containers, which does not (much to my dismay) use Libvirt, and also KubeVirt which uses Libvirt but not for sandboxing (only to drive QEMU; Kubernetes takes care of the sandboxing by running one VM per pod). But the original architecture is still in use and new users appeared such as cockpit-machine and crun-vm.

Another super interesting project for KVM userspace is libkrun which, among other things, is being used for gaming on Arm Mac's. :)

Firecracker's scope has grown somewhat, in particular it supports snapshots for warm start of VMs.

QEMU's microvm didn't have a huge success but recently Amazon contributed support for running Nitro enclaves in QEMU, which reuses a lot of the microvm code.

Some Rust components have been developed to build virtio devices out of process (for example virtiofsd). QEMU is also experimenting with devices written in Rust, and I expect to have two almost-entirely-safe-Rust devices (converted from C) within a month or two.

umur · a year ago

Thank you Paolo — for what was an excellent post, and also for this helpful update!

umur commented on Why Companies Are Ditching the Cloud: The Rise of Cloud Repatriation thenewstack.io/why-compan... · Posted by u/panrobo

ksec · a year ago

37signals spends more than $3M a year on cloud. So while it definitely isn't a major enterprise. It is also a lot more than a a few dozen servers.

I am not anti-cloud and pro cloud. My major problem with the new trend is that a lot of people are basically rediscovering pre "Cloud" era. which is VPS, Dedicated server and Colocation. And people are suggesting Hetzner or OVH or many other players are equivalent to AWS. While I dont disagree AWS is charging a lot for their offering, putting AWS to other services isn't even a valid comparison.

Completely ignoring the basics such as Server / CPU / RAM / SSD quality. Network quality such as interconnect, redundancy, as well as Data Center quality. If you rally want to do simple price and spec comparison you might as well go to Lowendbox to find a low cost VPS which some people have been doing since 2008.

I really wish there is a middle ground somewhere before using Hyperscalers. Both DO / Linode couldn't reach a larger scale. Hetzner is expanding their Cloud offering only and no dedicated outside EU.

umur · a year ago

There is indeed a large gap in the market between outsourcing all your infrastructure to Hyperscalers vs. hosting it on DIY-bare-metal and/or VPC providers. An open source alternative to AWS would do much to fill that gap, and we are building just that at Ubicloud (I'm one of the co-founders).

So far with Ubicloud, you get virtual machines, load balancers, private networking, managed PostgreSQL, all with encryption at rest and in-transit. The Ubicloud managed service uses Hetzner bare metal as one of its hosting providers, which cuts costs 2x - 10x compared to AWS/Azure. Would love to hear any feedback if you'd like to give it a try, or go through the repo here: https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud

umur commented on Ubicloud: Open, Free, and Portable Cloud ubicloud.com/... · Posted by u/alexzeitler

Endy · 2 years ago

From a branding standpoint, when I saw the name, my first thought is that this was a cloud solution from Ubisoft. I'm not sure if that's a positive.

umur · 2 years ago

Our naming intent is for a "ubiquitous" cloud, one that can run anywhere -- no affliations! :)

umur commented on Ubicloud: Open, Free, and Portable Cloud ubicloud.com/... · Posted by u/alexzeitler

yjftsjthsd-h · 2 years ago

I'm not following. Is this like kubernetes where you can run it on your own hardware or pay for it As A Service? Is it open source? (It contrasts most clouds as "But they are closed source" but I'm not seeing code?)

Edit: Docs point to https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud which is marked AGPL and appears to have self hosting instructions. Would have been nice to have that up front but /shrug

umur · 2 years ago

Ubicloud cofounder here, thanks for the question!

You can think of Ubicloud as software that takes bare metal servers as its input, and provides VMs and other cloud infrastructure services as its output. You can self-host Ubicloud on your own hardware, or use it as a managed service.

Comments below are on point: Compared to OpenStack, Ubicloud is simpler, comes with a managed service that you can use in minutes (vs days/weeks), and provides more services such as managed databases.

Compared to Kubernetes, Ubicloud covers layers both above and below Kubernetes. For example, running K8s on AWS/Azure/GCP depends on having VMs where the pods can run on. Similarly, running a managed database service on K8s requires much more than the basic K8s service itself.

Put differently, all major cloud providers have proprietary software similar in purpose to Ubicloud, which they use to provide their core cloud services. Using AWS as an example, services like EC2, RDS for managed Postgres, or EKS for managed Kubernetes, all run on this type of software. Ubicloud makes this software open source, and allows it to run anywhere--not just on AWS data centers.

umur commented on Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners ubicloud.com/use-cases/gi... · Posted by u/umur

robertlagrant · 2 years ago

If we're doing nits, because this product looks cool, here are a couple of potential tweaks:

> Imagine to do more

I'd get rid of this. I don't understand the phrase, and it sounds like fluff.

> Fast runs even at this price point

I'd get rid of the "point". "Price point" isn't a synonym for "price", which I think is what's being attempted here. I'd be tempted to just have no tagline, and retitle this section "Faster than GitHub Actions". You've already said it's cheaper.

> Ubicloud is an open, free, and portable cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems. You can check out our source code in GitHub or see Ubicloud runners in action for our GitHub Actions. An open and portable cloud gives you the option to manage your own VMs and runners, should you choose to.

This is woolly. How about: Ubicloud is an open and free cloud. You can run it on the hosting provider of your choice, or bring your own hardware. Check out our source code on GitHub!

umur · 2 years ago

Much appreciate the nits! I've made a few minor tweaks right now, we will do a more complete revision later on.

umur commented on Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners ubicloud.com/use-cases/gi... · Posted by u/umur

rgbrgb · 2 years ago

Congrats on the launch. Looks interesting. Quick thoughts on the landing page:

- Pricing looks awesome.

- I'm not currently the target audience because everything I'm doing right now is open source with free GitHub actions.

- I'm left wondering what the catch is / why it's cheaper and faster.

- Visual nit: lacking horizontal padding from 990px to ~1200px, a common window size on my 14" MBP.

> Ubicloud is an open source cloud. Think of it as an open alternative to cloud providers, like what Linux is to proprietary operating systems. You can self-host Ubicloud or use our managed service.

I find this hard to parse and the first few times I thought you were saying it's a linux alternative. I just clicked to the docs and the "What is Ubicloud?" section is clearer because you say concretely and directly what it is rather than how I should think of it metaphorically: "infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) features on providers that lease bare metal instances, such as Hetzner, OVH, and AWS Bare Metal. It’s also available as a managed service."

There's some old "counterintuitive" adage I'm too lazy to look up about how the best marketing to engineers is just saying in concrete language what it is rather than the benefit it provides. In this case, I'd do both: tell me what it actually is and why that makes it cheaper/better. Also a minor note, there's a typo in that paragraph (missing space "systems.Ubicloud").

umur · 2 years ago

Thank you for your feedback! I've just made several edits to the text for clarity; will also fix UX bugs and do bigger a update in the upcoming weeks.

umur commented on Show HN: Open-source x64 and Arm GitHub runners ubicloud.com/use-cases/gi... · Posted by u/umur

matt_heimer · 2 years ago

The docs still say the Elastic license is used but looking at https://github.com/ubicloud/ubicloud/blob/main/LICENSE it looks like the project might have switched to GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 in the last day.

umur · 2 years ago

thank you and that's correct, just updated the docs as well.