Show HN: Shellmates – Rent bare metal and divide into VMs with firecracker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Shellmates – Rent bare metal and divide into VMs with firecracker

4 pointsandrewfromx4 comments

Hello devs, weekend passion project here. It started with this burning desire I've have for a while to rent a bare metal server from Hetzner. Sure it's all the way in Germany and I'm in the USA but the price! $34 a month for 64 GB RAM, 4 core cpu, 512 GB SSD. That's like 90% less from AWS ec2 instance of same specs.

How shellmates works:

    1. Rent a powerful bare metal server from providers like Hetzner or OVH at prices starting from $34.50/month
    2. We help you setup Firecracker VMs to divide your server into smaller VMs
    3. Keep what you need and rent out the rest to other developers at fair prices
    4. Save up to 90% compared to cloud providers like AWS while building relationships with other developers

So I'm eating my own dogfood with:

https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev/spots/c8f3c470-f353-4804-...

Looking for someone to share the cost with me. There is a real stripe link for $18.07 a month. (Exactly half my actual cost + stripe fees.)

Learned a ton about Firecracker and Firecracker's jailer and how to setup everything with iproutes.

The homepage tries to explain everything:

https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev

Thanks for checking it out! And I'm totally serious about sharing this server.

[video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNcnoMVRC68]

This is a cool idea. I also like the website, very clean looking, congrats.

I do have some questions: can the owner of a server split it any way they want ? For example if I have a 64 GB server with 16 cores (something OVH provides IIRC) can I split it into 32 2GB/0.5CPU VM ? (assuming firecracker can handle fractions of a CPU, I don’t know). This could make for some really cheap VM compared to even OVH’s offering.

For that matter do you only support certain types of server or can the owner choose any server they want from Hetzner or OVH ?

So it was just a weekend of coding so far, lots more to do. Right now I have everything hard coded to just split into half based on my example server of 64, 4, 400. If you look at the script:

https://github.com/andrewarrow/shellmates/blob/main/firecrac...

You can see lots of hard coded stuff just to get it to work at Hetzner on rockylinux9. I think I can make the script a lot more customizable in the UI and let you do all sort of fancy splits! Firecracker does support fractional CPU allocation through CPU shares and quota settings. When you configure a Firecracker microVM, you can specify:

CPU shares (relative weight)

CPU quota (maximum usage in microseconds per period)

CPU period (measurement period in microseconds)

As long as the server has rockylinux9 I think it should work anywhere!

Oh I didn’t realize it was open source.

The wording « We help you setup Firecracker VMs » made me think it was a SaaS at first but maybe I was mistaken. Is the idea that a community should host its own instance of shellmates ?

Anyone's welcome to run their own on another domain. Would be so cool to see someone do this. shellmates.com is for sale $5k!

I'll keep running on the subdomain of https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev/ because I don't want to spend any more money on another domain lol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com