colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Postgres can be tuned to 10k inserts per second, Kafka is definitely overkill for 200/s

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Reminds me of this video about the origin of the name Tiffany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9LMr5XTgeyI

"I didn't fly across the Atlantic to... Of course I did"

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Reminds me of the ghost Unicode character saga: https://www.dampfkraft.com/ghost-characters.html

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Nested virt doesn't work with some things like OS snapshot/restore, so they might not support it to allow those features.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

We got around this at my company by just pooling all of the LISTEN/NOTIFY streams into a single database connection in software, here's a sample implementation:

function software_listen(channel, callback):

  if not channel_listened(channel):

    sql("LISTEN " + channel)

  listeners[channel].append(callback)

function on_message(channel, data):

  for listener in listeners[channel]

    listener(channel, data)

function unlisten(channel, listener):

  listeners[channel].remove(listener)

  if len(listeners[channel]) == 0:

    sql("UNLISTEN " + channel)

Here's the actual go implementation we use:

https://gist.github.com/ColinChartier/59633c1006407478168b52...

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

As far as I understand, that's 100 shared queries across all users.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Paul Graham would say for exponential growth, 10x better is the bar

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Sure, I meant "docker" here as a simplification for the OCI format.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Will add those to the landing page - they got lost in the Figma design

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

It looks like all of the auth data is empty - maybe you logged into an account which doesn't have permission to install on that repository?

If you email me at [email protected] with your GitHub account name, webapp.io account (if any), and the name of the repository, I can take a look for you.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Practically - We don't actually require you to use Docker, and we don't use it under the hood. The configuration (which looks like a Dockerfile) can run multiple containers in the same VM:

FROM vm/ubuntu:22.04

RUN (install docker)

RUN REPEATABLE docker-compose build

RUN BACKGROUND docker-compose up

EXPOSE WEBSITE localhost:8080

You can also just run entirely non-docker services:

RUN BACKGROUND redis-server

- The DSL will watch which files are used for each build step to skip everything you haven't changed, so builds are much faster - You can use us to clone VMs and run Cypress tests in parallel, then promote one of the clones to a preview environment, and another to a production environment - We're more declarative (in my opinion), we don't have a CLI. Everything is done by editing a Layerfile and git pushing it

TL;DR, we focused on a declarative configuration format to quickly build, fork, and hibernate VMs, where Fly is more focused on building/shipping docker containers (though the products do fill a similar niche)

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

We do have a caching anycast proxy like fly, render, and other webapp-focused PaaS providers.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

We don't actually host docker containers - the configuration DSL is based on Docker, but has crucial differences

In particular, you can do things like

RUN BACKGROUND docker-compose up

EXPOSE WEBSITE 8080

This is super important for most use-cases, since otherwise you have to deal with networking and version control.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

It's two environments per unique account - though you can email support to prove you're a real person and get this moved up.

We haven't had to formalize any policies, but they'll be similar to other cloud free tiers:

- HTTP only (no terabytes of videos or images exclusively)

- No crypto mining

- No phishing sites

- No sending emails, attacking others, etc

We currently do about a million builds a year, so 99% of projects shouldn't cause problems for us.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

We actually just migrated to NextJS this week - so there's still a few hairy bits with the frontend. Thanks for the report, should be fixed now.

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Webapp.io's money making part (which facilitates this) is a DevOps company (CI/CD, preview environments, etc) which is already hammered with that sort of thing - see this post (from when we were called LayerCI) discussed by TravisCI for context: https://blog.travis-ci.com/2021-10-20-mining

colinchartier

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

Hey HN,

We recently finished our firecracker-based webapp hosting platform.

It's like if Vercel and Docker had a baby: You write VM configurations in a language that looks like a Dockerfile, and every commit creates a preview environment which can be "promoted" to a production site.

Here's an example configuration:

``` FROM vm/ubuntu:18.04 RUN curl -fSsL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash RUN apt-get install nodejs COPY . . RUN npm install RUN npm run build RUN BACKGROUND npm run start EXPOSE WEBSITE localhost:3000 ```

This product combines our firecracker-based hypervisor (200ms cold starts) with a global CDN written in Go (using Caddy for TLS termination)

We can offer everything for free because we charge for the DevOps side (CI/CD & preview environments) - we have no intention of getting users and then upselling people for hosting.

We're obviously very excited about this launch, and would love to hear your feedback.

colinchartier

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

This was the idea behind https://webapp.io (YC S20):

- Run a linear series of steps

- Watch which files are read (at the OS level) during each step, and snapshot the entire RAM/disk state of the MicroVM

- When you next push, just skip ahead to the latest snapshot

In practice this makes a generalized version of "cache keys" where you can snapshot the VM as it builds, and then restore the most appropriate snapshot for any given change.

colinchartier

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Hey, yeah this looks somewhat similar to what we're building at https://webapp.io (nee LayerCI, YC S20)

We migrated to a fork of firecracker, but we're a fully hosted product that doesn't directly interact with GHA at all (similar to how CircleCI works), so there's some positioning difference between us and OP at the very least.

Always happy to see innovation in the space :)

colinchartier

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Another benchmark by maintainer of Vue and Vite, Evan You: https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr

He seems to imply that Turbopack is very close in performance to existing tooling like Vite in his benchmark, and not 10x better in common cases

Edit: his thoughts as of this hour: https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr/discussi...

colinchartier

Submissions

Show HN: GPT4 Powered Multiplayer Jeopardy

Show HN: Webapp.io - Free firecracker-based full-stack hosting

A Million WebSockets with Go

Vite vs. Turbopack Benchmark by Evan You

Show HN: Layerfiles, Dockerfiles that build VMs

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