I am building a cloud

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

A new startup cloud platform, exe.dev, aims to offer simpler, cheaper compute by renting fixed pools of CPU/RAM and letting users slice them into many small VMs, positioning itself as an antidote to complex, expensive hyperscaler stacks and Kubernetes-heavy setups. Commenters welcome the attempt but question whether the pricing and capabilities beat existing options like Hetzner, OVH, or DIY bare metal, and note that bandwidth costs and storage abstractions remain pain points. The thread broadens into a debate over when Kubernetes and managed cloud services are justified, how much infrastructure complexity typical apps really need, and whether AI tooling plus cheap dedicated hardware are shifting the economics back toward simpler, self-managed deployments.

What exe.dev offers

  • Pooled-compute model: you buy a fixed bundle (e.g., 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 25 GB disk, 100 GB transfer) and can split it into many small VMs that share those limits.
  • Strong SSH-first UX: ssh exe.dev to sign up and manage; built-in HTTPS proxy gives each VM a URL; geared toward root-on-a-Linux-box workflows and agent-style workloads.
  • Scope is intentionally narrow: more “developer cloud / agent farm” than full-featured cloud (no managed DBs, limited networking features, unclear data-center details).

Pricing and cloud economics

  • Many see $20/mo for pooled resources as attractive compared to hyperscalers’ fragmented, surprise-heavy bills.
  • Others note transfer at $0.07/GB is still high vs raw bandwidth; some call this inconsistent with the blog’s criticism of egress pricing. The team says this is a legacy number they plan to lower.
  • Debate over whether this is cost-competitive with cheap VPS or bare metal; some say it must add higher-level value (tooling, UX) to justify price.

Storage, IOPS, and bandwidth

  • Long subthread measuring IOPS/latency across Hetzner, DigitalOcean, netcup, and Hetzner dedicated; consensus: local NVMe is massively faster and cheaper than network block storage.
  • Others defend SAN-style block storage with redundancy and point-in-time snapshots as inherently expensive and often a poor abstraction for higher-level systems.
  • Bandwidth pricing across clouds widely criticized as disconnected from actual costs and designed to lock in customers.

Comparisons to VPS / bare metal providers

  • Hetzner, OVH, netcup, and others are repeatedly cited as dramatically cheaper and faster for many workloads; some wonder what exe.dev offers beyond “a nicer wrapper around hcloud/CLI.”
  • Counterpoint: many companies pay more for cloud to avoid owning hardware and staffing ops; with LLMs, some think running DIY infra is getting easier again.

Kubernetes, DevOps, and complexity

  • Huge split: some say most small/medium apps should just run on one or a few VMs (Kamal, Docker Compose, simple Ansible/Terraform), and K8s is overkill that bloats cost and incident count.
  • Others argue K8s is a powerful, standardized “OS for services” that solves real problems at scale (immutable deploys, rolling updates, multi-env parity, service discovery).
  • Many complaints aim at social dynamics: resume-driven decisions, vendor marketing, management fear, operator sprawl (operators, meshes, GitOps, etc.) rather than K8s’ core design.
  • Several note that teams often “rebuild a worse Kubernetes” with ad‑hoc scripts and tools; others prefer lighter alternatives (Nomad, Swarm, k3s, systemd + containers, Uncloud, Dokploy).

AI agents and “vibe coding”

  • exe.dev is positioned as friendly for LLM-based agents and ephemeral dev boxes.
  • Some are excited by the ability to spin up lots of cheap, isolated environments for agents, previews, and personal tools.
  • Others worry about an explosion of mediocre, insecure “vibe-coded” backends by non-experts; argue platforms should constrain what such users can do server-side.

Security, sovereignty, and compliance

  • exe.dev’s control plane and some early VMs still run on AWS; most customer VMs now on other bare metal or self-racked hosts. They plan to move fully once compliance is sorted.
  • European commenters stress need for truly EU-sovereign clouds (EU companies, not just EU regions) due to the CLOUD Act; US-based providers in EU data centers don’t fully solve this.

Startup and meta reactions

  • Mixed response to the blog’s tone: some find the ambition and transparency inspiring; others read it as self-important.
  • Many praise the minimal, playful landing page and SSH-based onboarding experience.
  • Skeptics question differentiation vs existing VPS/bare-metal offerings and worry the service will inevitably drift toward the same pricing and complexity patterns as major clouds.