crawshaw (Tailscale co-founder) launches exe.dev: buy a CPU/memory pool, carve it into as many VMs as you want, local NVMe, anycast network, TLS proxy included.
Key Takeaways
Current cloud VMs are wrong-shaped: tied to fixed CPU/memory ratios instead of letting you partition raw compute freely, forcing nested virtualization workarounds with real performance penalties.
SSDs broke remote block storage economics: HDD seek was 10ms so 1ms RTT was fine; SSD seek is 20 microseconds, making remote block overhead go from ~10% to 10x. EC2 at 200k IOPS runs ~$10k/month; a MacBook has 500k IOPS for free.
Cloud egress is priced 10x above normal datacenter rates, making affordable cross-vendor networking structurally impossible below large spend commitments.
Kubernetes cannot fix these problems because it is an abstraction on top of broken abstractions; it inherits VM, disk, and networking limits by design.
Agent-era Jevons paradox: agents make it easier to write code, so total software volume expands, amplifying every existing cloud abstraction failure at scale.
Hacker News Comment Review
Strong consensus that K8s operational complexity is real and compounds quickly, but enterprise platform engineers pushed back: in regulated industries like financial services, the complexity reflects genuine multi-team isolation requirements, not just resume-padding.
Early exe.dev users specifically called out the fixed-pool pricing model as the key differentiator for running many small isolated apps without per-VM spend meters ticking up.
Two separate skeptic threads: one worried the company will compromise its stated ideals as growth demands profit, citing the standard cloud trajectory; another questioned whether agent-driven software proliferation is a real demand driver versus just producing more unused code.
Notable Comments
@sahil-shubham: built a self-hostable Firecracker orchestrator on an auctioned Hetzner server specifically to get pooled-VM carving without cloud vendor constraints – concrete DIY validation of exe.dev’s core thesis.
@dbmikus: uses exe.dev today for vibe-coded apps; his sandboxed-coding-agent startup is actively evaluating switching to the same fixed-pool pricing model for their own product.