Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | anurag's commentslogin

The one redeeming feature of this failure is staged rollouts. As someone advertising routes through CF, we were quite happy to be spared from the initial 25%.

This is a big deal because you can now run Firecracker/other microVMs in an AWS VM instead of expensive AWS bare-metal instances.

GCP has had nested virtualization for a while.


You can use an expensive AWS VM instead of an expensive AWS bare–metal image. Does anyone realise how expensive AWS is, even in the best case?

It is expensive. But the point where it stops being expensive is far above most companies use case. If you're paying less than a developers salary for hosting you most likely won't see all that many benefits from moving.

Renting a server from cheaper hosting providers can be massive savings but you now need to re-invent all of the AWS APIs you use or might use and it's big CAPEX time investment. And any new feature you need, whether that's queue, mail gateway or thousand other APIs need to be deployed and managed first before you can even start testing.

It's less work now than it was before just due to amount of tools there are to automate it but it's still more work that you could be spending on improving your product.


> but you now need to re-invent all of the AWS APIs you use or might use and it's big CAPEX time investment

Or maybe you just never needed most of these in the first place. People got into this "AWS" mentality like it is the only way to do things. Everything had to be in a queue, event driven etc.

I'd argue not using AWS means simplifying things and it'll be less expensive not just in server cost but developer time.


You don't get how this works. You buy in AWS because everyone else is , so it's expected. It diffuses risk to your stock options. This also begets a whole generation of people who can only use cloud services so now you are more hard pressed to find people with experience to run things without the cloud. You also create a bigger expenses sheet so it shows you're investing and growing, attracting more investors. "We pay 10 mil in AWS , we're that big". It's classic perverse incentives feeding into a monoculture.

Agreed. Some threads make the suggestion you replied to and seemingly fail to ignore the reality of business. Not all businesses want to insource all problems.

If you ever used the aws apis to begin with.

Folks are increasingly staying cloud agnostic - meaning install and run the open source package that a cloud packages yourself.

It’s surprising how many are ready to go today compared to 10 years ago.


System admins are probably cheaper that Cloud experts devops.

Good system admins? No.

Not at scale to run your own bunch of servers competently.

OCI supports it with Intel. I know it works with AMD, but we don't officially support that so far as I'm aware. The performance hit on AMD is bigger than Intel, last I looked.

Was hoping this comment would be here. Firecracker and microVMs are good use-case. Also, being able to simply test and develop is a nice to have.

Nested virtualization can mean a lot of things. Not just full VMs.


> Firecracker and microVMs are good use-case.

Good use-case for what?


We operate a postgres service on Firecracker. You can create as many databases as you want, and we memory-snapshot them after 5 seconds of inactivity, and spin them up again in 50ms when a query arrives.

https://www.prisma.io/postgres


Nowadays universal answer for "what? why?" is AI. AI agent needs VMs to run generated code in sandbox as they can not be trusted.

I don't think everyone should assume that AI is the answer to all questions. I was asking the person I replied to, thanks.

The poster you asked can reply too - Postgres and microvms are worth considering nearly every time at the start.

Beyond encapsulation it greatly increases the portability of the software between environments and different clouds.


We are running Sandboxes for AI Agents using Firecracker microVMS @ E2B

whats the ~ perf hit of something like this?

Nowadays nested just wastes the extra operating system overhead and I/O performance if your VM doesn't have paravirtualization drivers installed. CPUs all have hardware support.

As a practical matter, anywhere from 5-15%.

Azure has had nested virt available for a while too. I used to run HyperV in cloud

Azure has recently announced "direct virtualization", which is a sort of logical nesting, in which users can sub-partition their L1 VMs into virtual L2 VMs that are technically siblings.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurecompute/scalin...

(I work there)


Cool, so that’s the new and preferred model for nested or sibling virt?

eventually yes, this is supposed to remove the perf tax of nested virtualization (less world/context switches on vm_exits) and unlocks some new use cases (pass through hardware from your VM to the sibling-guest).

Interesting ! I stopped working in Azure back in August. But I know of teams still using the nested virt HyperV setup I created to allow multicast to between VMs in Cloud.

Render's built its own Postgres (we don't use RDS). Glad to hear it's working well for you!


That's pretty cool! Thanks for your work. No PaaS is perfect but quite satisfied with Render.


Nuance has a unique offering: prescription hearing glasses built for noisy environments: https://www.nuanceaudio.com/en-us/c/hearing-glasses


A relative got these and really likes them.


Appreciate the extra transparency on the process.


Great to hear Render worked for you!


(Render CEO) We're prioritizing Object Storage independent of this move.


I work at Render (render.com); we have over 4 million developers on the platform, and we've migrated many large (and small) Heroku customers over because of our more modern capabilities and scalable pricing.

https://render.com/docs/migrate-from-heroku


Much-needed innovation in scaling Postgres. Congratulations on the launch!


I work at Render. We've removed the phishing website from the platform.


Amazing work! This is the first time I've seen this kind of issue fixed so quickly.

GitHub should learn from this.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: