Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregmac | Hacker News Reader

> Hakuna Cloud is a software-as-a-service HTTPS proxy. You don't need to change existing software or infrastructure, and you don't need to install additional tools on your servers.

> Each cloud server must have an FQDN/DNS name configured as a CNAME to our load balancers.

> When your server stops receiving requests, it will be stopped. As soon as a new request arrives, Hakuna will start it.

Interesting idea. It's like a proxy that kind of makes an instance/vm-based service act like a serverless service, without moving to containers or rewriting.

Seems kind of niche but I can see the use: there's a lot of services that have a time-based usage pattern (during working hours, or used interactively for a few minutes/hours sparsely through the day).

What are the cold start times like with this (at least for a typical, simple app - say on asp.net on Windows or something hosted via nginx on Linux)? What happens if an instance is being stopped and a new request comes in - does the request have to wait for shutdown plus startup?

At Hakuna we use our own service to start and stop our Jira and NPM servers; the instances are automatically stopped at night or whenever nobody needs to do `npm install`.

In our use case, the EC2 instance starts in about 50 seconds, with another minute needed to start the Jira service.

We have a demo, deployable directly from our CLI, that starts a Nginx server on an Oracle Cloud instance in less than 40 seconds.

If the instance is being stopped and a new request arrives, it will have to wait shutdown + startup, yes.

Thanks.

Is there UI feedback to the user during the wait, or does the browser just show "waiting for response" for the whole time? If a user refreshes the browser a bunch of times during the wait, will the Hakuna proxy give up on those requests or still pass all of them through to the target server?

We cannot provide UI feedback during the wait: being a HTTPS proxy, we would need the SSL certificate to reply to the request, otherwise it would be some kind of MitM.

If the client closes the socket before the start of the server, the proxy gives up on its requests.

You should probably check your website on mobile. For me on Firefox Android, the unmoving header takes up 60-70% of the screen and the actual scrolling content is crammed into the bottom fraction.

For time-based server start/stop, we use https://www.parkmycloud.com/ .

I'm looking forward to checking out Hakuna Cloud - looks like the two services are pretty complimentary.

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