This may have just killed my project

vitobotta

https://fly.io/blog/fks/

I had started working on a bring your own provider, multi cloud Kubernetes service and after a lot of feedback I had settled for an open source solution that you could self host for free, or use my cloud/host version and pay for it and for support. "Settled" maybe is a big word, because I was still uncertain of whether it would work as business model. The idea was to make Kubernetes clusters as affordable as possible for people and companies with small budgets, but there is basically no point with me continuing, if Fly prices Kubernetes as cheap as their PaaS and if it's already multi region as it seems.

I feel upset but at the same time relieved that this was announced now and not 3-4 months into development...

Unless I come up with a brilliant idea for some other project, I think I will just forget side projects for now and invest my free time in bug bounties to try and earn extra cash, since security is my other passion.

Have you ever had some project of yours killed at the start by some competing product or service?

plumberg

Just because some other company or business provides service similar to a pet project you have dreamed or have passion for... doesn't mean that goes down the drain....

What if the company switches gears in future?

It's folly to just give up your passion.

You never know how things would turn out for yourself or the business in q.

Plus I feel multiple players fosters competition.

jar

@vitobotta said: I had settled for an open source solution that you could self host for free

"That sounds like a deliberate decision to sacrifice or reduce reliability for your customers in order to keep the service as affordable/cheap as possible."

vitobotta

@plumberg said:
Just because some other company or business provides service similar to a pet project you have dreamed or have passion for... doesn't mean that goes down the drain....

What if the company switches gears in future?

It's folly to just give up your passion.

You never know how things would turn out for yourself or the business in q.

Plus I feel multiple players fosters competition.

I don't feel like I can compete just me, however well I know this stuff, with them considered my very limited resources. It's a big project, something I wouldn't build just for myself in case it didn't work as a business, despite it's fun to build

vitobotta

@jar said:

@vitobotta said: I had settled for an open source solution that you could self host for free

"That sounds like a deliberate decision to sacrifice or reduce reliability for your customers in order to keep the service as affordable/cheap as possible."

I get it you are annoyed with what I said. Noted

tra10000

@vitobotta said: Have you ever had some project of yours killed at the start by some competing product or service?

Yes, always.
We dream, others do it.

For example, Clear is now both shampoo, shower gel and face wash. 3 in 1

However, I have been using soap for 3 things for years
My project was interrupted. I don't shower anymore.

host_c

@vitobotta said: Have you ever had some project of yours killed at the start by some competing product or service?

Oh boy, at least a dozen in the past decade.

Do what you believe in, that is my advice, ignore the rest.

emgh

I mean

I think you cancel stuff all the time, way to early, and something in me tells me that you WAS going to find something to rationalize cancelling this too

But

On the other hand

If you believe what they’re doing is exactly what you imagined, that it’s exactly that but better and developed with more resources, unless your project is unique, I’d say cancelling makes sense

I mean, I’ve always been frustrated with the phrase ”never give up”, because the reality is that often enough, you should give up. Very few people that have started a successful project did so with their first ever project, however, knowing when to give up and when to do the oposite and give it all, that’s the hard part

vitobotta

@emgh said:
I mean

I think you cancel stuff all the time, way to early, and something in me tells me that you WAS going to find something to rationalize cancelling this too

Why do you keep saying this stuff? Do you realise it's tiring? I DON'T cancel stuff all the time. I only cancel what doesn't work for me.

But

On the other hand

If you believe what they’re doing is exactly what you imagined, that it’s exactly that but better and developed with more resources, unless your project is unique, I’d say cancelling makes sense

I mean, I’ve always been frustrated with the phrase ”never give up”, because the reality is that often enough, you should give up. Very few people that have started a successful project did so with their first ever project, however, knowing when to give up and when to do the oposite and give it all, that’s the hard part

emgh

@vitobotta why do you think?

noob404

Sorry to hear that. All I can say is, don't give up. Trynna stay positive.

yokowasis

Am I missing something here ? isn't fly.io is just google cloud build ?

FlorinMarian

@vitobotta said:
https://fly.io/blog/fks/

I had started working on a bring your own provider, multi cloud Kubernetes service and after a lot of feedback I had settled for an open source solution that you could self host for free, or use my cloud/host version and pay for it and for support. "Settled" maybe is a big word, because I was still uncertain of whether it would work as business model. The idea was to make Kubernetes clusters as affordable as possible for people and companies with small budgets, but there is basically no point with me continuing, if Fly prices Kubernetes as cheap as their PaaS and if it's already multi region as it seems.

I feel upset but at the same time relieved that this was announced now and not 3-4 months into development...

Unless I come up with a brilliant idea for some other project, I think I will just forget side projects for now and invest my free time in bug bounties to try and earn extra cash, since security is my other passion.

Have you ever had some project of yours killed at the start by some competing product or service?

Don't be sad, before and after the storm there is always sunshine.
Out of compassion for you, I'm giving you this piece of code that consumed 3 weeks of my life until I found how to trick Ansible in order to get a command on one host and execute it on another, even if you put the entire group with masters and workers as input.

---

- name: Get Join Command
  shell: kubeadm token create --ttl 5m --print-join-command
  register: join_command
  when: ansible_hostname == first_master

- name: "Add Join Command To Dummy Host"
  add_host:
    name: "K8S_JOIN_COMMAND_HOLDER"
    command: "{{ join_command.stdout }}"
  when: ansible_hostname == first_master

- name: Join Worker Nodes To Cluster
  shell: "{{ hostvars['K8S_JOIN_COMMAND_HOLDER']['command'] }}"
  args:
    creates: /etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf
  delegate_to: "{{ item }}"
  with_items: "{{ groups['k8s-workers'] }}"

cybertech

ok

Chievo

Probably true.invest in real life things. Real estate etc

vitobotta

@yokowasis said:
Am I missing something here ? isn't fly.io is just google cloud build ?

They are a PaaS, so not something like Cloud Build. And they have just introduced managed Kubernetes as per the announcement I linked to

BlaZe

Eh, remember, Google was not the 1st search engine, Amazon wasn't the 1st e-commerce website.

If you are really serious about it, then work on it, you'll definitely succeed. This hasn't killed your project.

TrK

There's discord, slack, teams, etc but people still uses rocket.chat and other self hosted stuff for a reason. Humans are competitive by nature, you can't do anything...

ddorian43

@vitobotta

Their 128GB server is priced at $1126.33/mo. ~1/10 of that is hosting cost.

What pricing did you have in mind for a similar server (excluding the hosting costs)?

SirFoxy

You don’t have to be the first mover in a marketplace to be successful.

In fact, that gives you an opportunity to improve on the first movers product and find a better product/market fit.

Your product if successful would have been copied by someone else within months anyways.

P.S. “If you build it, they will come” is such a tech bro fantasy.

It will never be about who has the better product. It’s about who has the better product and advertises it better.

sreekanth850

imho, not one player can eat 100% market share, now that your idea is fully validated and you know there is a demand, i think you should keep some USP in your product and find your own target customers rather winding up things.

Levi

So, giving up only because of 1 competitor in the market? Well... That's a bummer. Seems you need good life life coach/mentor to stay positive on your goals.

vitobotta

@ddorian43 said:
@vitobotta

Their 128GB server is priced at $1126.33/mo. ~1/10 of that is hosting cost.

What pricing did you have in mind for a similar server (excluding the hosting costs)?

In the beginning I was going to use Hetzner Cloud as main provider due to the fact that they offer support for autoscaling. Later I would have switched to dedicated servers to lower the costs.

@LTniger said:
So, giving up only because of 1 competitor in the market? Well... That's a bummer. Seems you need good life life coach/mentor to stay positive on your goals.

It demolished my motivation to be honest. Maybe it's a sign that I am not good at this side of business stuff

FlorinMarian

Maybe you are not passionate enough about what you were doing?
I'm referring to the fact that if you've lost your motivation to make a lot of money, you've also lost your motivation to continue the project.

To understand what I mean, think that in a world where AWS, Google and others have billion dollar datacenters, someone competes with them by creating his own datacenter at home, even if it means spending all his savings. (no idea who's this guy)

Levi

@FlorinMarian said:
Maybe you are not passionate enough about what you were doing?
I'm referring to the fact that if you've lost your motivation to make a lot of money, you've also lost your motivation to continue the project.

To understand what I mean, think that in a world where AWS, Google and others have billion dollar datacenters, someone competes with them by creating his own datacenter at home, even if it means spending all his savings. (no idea who's this guy)

Passion is very temporary. The drive must go from curiosity and desire to learn. Vitto is a professional and therefore he didn't find big enough learning curve in his endevour.

vitobotta

@FlorinMarian said:
Maybe you are not passionate enough about what you were doing?
I'm referring to the fact that if you've lost your motivation to make a lot of money, you've also lost your motivation to continue the project.

To understand what I mean, think that in a world where AWS, Google and others have billion dollar datacenters, someone competes with them by creating his own datacenter at home, even if it means spending all his savings. (no idea who's this guy)

I have lost the motivation to invest months building something that I am unsure will work / people will want to pay for, that's the thing. Building is fun, but a project of that size isn't something I would do just for fun without a ROI.

@LTniger said:

@FlorinMarian said:
Maybe you are not passionate enough about what you were doing?
I'm referring to the fact that if you've lost your motivation to make a lot of money, you've also lost your motivation to continue the project.

To understand what I mean, think that in a world where AWS, Google and others have billion dollar datacenters, someone competes with them by creating his own datacenter at home, even if it means spending all his savings. (no idea who's this guy)

Passion is very temporary. The drive must go from curiosity and desire to learn. Vitto is a professional and therefore he didn't find big enough learning curve in his endevour.

There's always something to learn however experienced you are, and building a multi cloud managed kubernetes service is not trivial so there is a lot to learn along the way. Like I said above I am just not convinced about doing it primarily for fun if I am not convinced that it will make money given the competition. So money is also a reason to build stuff, because I would need more money at the moment but I can't ask for a pay raise at the moment and I don't want to leave my job, which I like. So that's why I am thinking to invest time in bug bounties instead of spending months building something that might likely fail due to the lack of resources/money.

MrLime

@vitobotta - I think you should continue with the project. Mold it in a way that serves the interests of the intended audience and also satisfies your urge to build something that you can call your own and be proud of it. Focus on the core goals you want to set out to achieve and go from there.

The big bodybuilders don't necessarily need to enjoy the GYM or want to go to the GYM, but they realise their consistency and overaching want to achive bigger and greater things is what makes them better and keeps them on the right path.

A few years ago I entered a market full of saturation. But we could see a clear opportunity to revolutionise that small market, and guess what. We did just that and although new players have arrived with even bigger potential and bigger pockets. It was good to know I was apart of improving that market.

Edit: That reminds me, not too long after GTM we were copied by a competitor almost like for like. It didn't phase us at all.

thane

This isn't right at all. You're supposed to secure investor funds first, THEN deadpool the project.

Hassan

@yokowasis said:
Am I missing something here ? isn't fly.io is just google cloud build ?

They host their own infra and actually utilize Amazon's Firecracker virtualization to host their apps which Amazon uses for Lambda and other serverless stuff. https://fly.io/docs/reference/architecture/

Levi

@vitobotta said:

@FlorinMarian said:
Maybe you are not passionate enough about what you were doing?
I'm referring to the fact that if you've lost your motivation to make a lot of money, you've also lost your motivation to continue the project.

To understand what I mean, think that in a world where AWS, Google and others have billion dollar datacenters, someone competes with them by creating his own datacenter at home, even if it means spending all his savings. (no idea who's this guy)

I have lost the motivation to invest months building something that I am unsure will work / people will want to pay for, that's the thing. Building is fun, but a project of that size isn't something I would do just for fun without a ROI.

@LTniger said:

@FlorinMarian said:
Maybe you are not passionate enough about what you were doing?
I'm referring to the fact that if you've lost your motivation to make a lot of money, you've also lost your motivation to continue the project.

To understand what I mean, think that in a world where AWS, Google and others have billion dollar datacenters, someone competes with them by creating his own datacenter at home, even if it means spending all his savings. (no idea who's this guy)

Passion is very temporary. The drive must go from curiosity and desire to learn. Vitto is a professional and therefore he didn't find big enough learning curve in his endevour.

There's always something to learn however experienced you are, and building a multi cloud managed kubernetes service is not trivial so there is a lot to learn along the way. Like I said above I am just not convinced about doing it primarily for fun if I am not convinced that it will make money given the competition. So money is also a reason to build stuff, because I would need more money at the moment but I can't ask for a pay raise at the moment and I don't want to leave my job, which I like. So that's why I am thinking to invest time in bug bounties instead of spending months building something that might likely fail due to the lack of resources/money.

It is normal to fear when starting and doing business. You taking a risk. Just push forward to beta stage. Do not finish, just push with grinding teath. Present your product here, probably @raindog308 will give you some LEB light exposure with article. Also HN link would gather few users.

Than you will see real demand for your service and how well it would monetize.

Do not let fear stop you. Push it.

ddorian43

@vitobotta

You should (IMHO) do it for dedicated servers. And add features on top. Think like PostgreSQL hosting. Or Redis. etc.

Then you can sell it to dedicated hosting providers (like what neon.tech does) or sell to normal users.

Kinda like ubicloud is doing.