Comment by colinchartier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinchartier | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> You write VM configurations in a language that looks like a Dockerfile

What are the differences from a Dockerfile?

Serverless isn't that enjoyable for me since I don't like using old versions of stuff. Vercel doesn't support Node 19, which means you can't use built-in fetch without it logging a warning about fetch being experimental every time you call it.

IIRC it took a long time for Node 18 to be available.

Containers FTW. You can use things in production when the maintainers release to production, not when AWS Lambda has them.

> You can use things in production when the maintainers release to production, not when AWS Lambda has them.

You can run anything the hell you want in AWS Lambda as it is literally just a container. The documentation even shows you how to write your lambda function entirely in a handful of lines of bash using curl to request the job and submit the result.

What are the limitations of the free hosting? Surely I can’t deploy once and scale infinitely without paying you, right?

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.

Vercel aka Zeit originally hosted Docker containers.

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.

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