I am building a cloud

by bumbledraven on 4/23/2026, 4:44:19 AM

https://crawshaw.io/blog/building-a-cloud

Comments

by: clktmr

> Agents, by making it easiest to write code, means there will be a lot more software. Economists would call this an instance of Jevons paradox. Each of us will write more programs, for fun and for work.There is already so much software out there, which isn't used by anyone. Just take a look at any appstore. I don't understand why we are so obsessed with cranking out even more, whereas the obvious usecase for LLMs should be to write better software. Let's hope the focus shifts from code generation to something else. There are many ways LLMs can assist in writing better code.

4/23/2026, 6:55:57 AM

by: stingraycharles

Potentially useful context: OP is one of the cofounders of Tailscale.> Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack.I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go: start with great ideals, but as success grows, so must profit.Cloud vendor pricing often isn't based on cost. Some services they lose money on, others they profit heavily from. These things are often carefully chosen: the type of costs that only go up when customers are heavily committed—bandwidth, NAT gateway, etc.But I'm fairly certain OP knows this.

4/23/2026, 5:05:36 AM

by: farfatched

Nice post. exe.dev is a cool service that I enjoyed.I agree there is opportunity in making LLM development flows smooth, paired with the flexibility of root-on-a-Linux-machine.> Time and again I have said “this is the one” only to be betrayed by some half-assed, half-implemented, or half-thought-through abstraction. No thank you.The irony is that this is my experience of Tailscale.Finally, networking made easy. Oh god, why is my battery doing so poorly. Oh god, it's modified my firewall rules in a way that's incompatible with some other tool, and the bug tracker is silent. Now I have to understand their implementation, oh dear.No thank you.

4/23/2026, 6:16:30 AM

by: esher

Much respect for the ambitous plan, I wish I could do such bold thinking. I am running a small PHP PaaS (fortrabbit) for more than 10 years. For me, it's not only "scratch your own itch", but also "know your audience". So, a limited feature set with a high level of abstraction can also be useful for some users > clear path.

4/23/2026, 6:58:39 AM

by: faangguyindia

i just use Hetzner.Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime.i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us.i don't know why would i even ever use GCP or AWS anymore.All my services are fully HA and backup works like charm everyday.

4/23/2026, 5:52:30 AM

by: k9294

That's really cool!Over thing I'm confused with is how to create a shared resources like e.g. a redis server and connect to it from other vms? It looks now stupidly complex to setup tailscale or connect via ssh between VMS. Also what about egress? My guess is that all traffic billed at 0.07$ per GB. It looks like this cloud is made to run statefull agents and personal isolated projects and distributed systems or horizontal scaling is a good fit for it?Also I'm curious why not railway pricing model of billing per resource utilization? Its very convenient and I would argue is made for agents era.I did setup for my friends and family a railway project that spawns a vm with disk (statefull service) via a tg bot and runs an openclaw like agent - it costs me something like 2$ to run 9 vms like this.

4/23/2026, 6:53:18 AM

by: sroussey

> The standard price for a GB of egress from a cloud provider is 10x what you pay racking a server in a normal data center.Oh, that’s too kind. More like 100x to 1000x. Raw bandwidth is cheap.

4/23/2026, 6:24:20 AM

by: zackify

That's insane funding so congrats.Just shows I'm the Dropbox commentator. I have what exe provides on my own and am shocked by the value these abstractions provide everyone else!! One off containers on my own hardware spin up spin down run async agents, etc, tailscale auth, team can share or connect easily by name.

4/23/2026, 5:08:03 AM

by: Growtika

Congrats. Just checked your homepage. I love the fact you also show this comment"That must be worst website ever made"Made me love the site and style even more

4/23/2026, 6:48:52 AM

by: achille

What will happen to my "Grandfathered Plan" I signed up to test it, don't recall if I gave you my credit card

4/23/2026, 6:49:15 AM

by: speedgoose

I welcome the initiative but it’s pretty costly compared to the bare metal cloud providers. So the value as to be the platform as service too.

4/23/2026, 6:46:34 AM

by: st-keller

Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!

4/23/2026, 5:34:25 AM

by: pjc50

The "one price" is oddly small for a cloud company. I'm sure it's nice and fast but the $20/mo seems smaller than some companies' free tiers, especially for disk.The main reason clouds offer network block devices is abstraction.

4/23/2026, 6:28:37 AM

by: qaq

With LLMs there is no real dev velocity penalty of using high perf. langs like say Rust. A pair of 192 Core AMD EPYC boxes will have enough headroom for 99.9% of projects.

4/23/2026, 6:33:37 AM

by: 47872324

exe.dev. 111 IN A 52.35.87.13452.35.87.134 <- Amazon Technologies Inc. (AT-88-Z)

4/23/2026, 6:17:37 AM

by: import

Article doesn’t really tell what fundamental problems will be solved, except fancy VM allocation. Nothing about hardware, networking, reliability, tooling and such. Well, nice, good luck.

4/23/2026, 6:05:45 AM

by: z3t4

You can run several VM's or containers with isolation on your phone hardware, why even use the cloud when you just want to show your friends?

4/23/2026, 6:15:07 AM

by: kjok

How difficult is it to build a second startup on the side?

4/23/2026, 5:48:49 AM

by: ianpurton

I don't get it, what is this, how is it different?

4/23/2026, 5:43:33 AM

by: poly2it

Why is an imperative SSH interface a better way of setting cloud resources than something like OpenTofu? In my experience humans and agents work better in declarative environments. If an OpenTofu integration is offered in the future, will exe.dev offer any value over existing cost-effective VPS providers like Hetzner? Technically, Hetzner, for example, also allows you to set up shared disk volumes:<a href="https://github.com/hetzneronline/community-content/blob/master/tutorials/mount-volume-on-multiple-servers-with-sshfs/01.en.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hetzneronline/community-content/blob/mast...</a>It also has a CLI, hcloud. Am I getting any value with exe.dev I couldn't get with an 80 line hcloud wrapper?

4/23/2026, 5:12:11 AM

by: vasco

I know its a personal blog but the writing style is really full of himself. What a martyr, starting a second company.

4/23/2026, 6:15:13 AM

by: ZihangZ

[dead]

4/23/2026, 6:45:13 AM

by: hani1808