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fduran

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http://fduran.com , email on web site.

- Founder, SadServers.com

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Yes, the website is for prospective (and current) clients.

A small annoyance in startup circles is getting feedback about my website front page along the lines of "I didn't understand your hero, everybody should understand in one sentence what you do". Well, no, my clients will self-select as in not everybody needs to understand what "troubleshooting servers" or "devops" is :-)

There is def some luck involved, as in you don't know beforehand what's going to be successful.

"You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people". It's way better to work on something you are familiar with and you like.

hello, thanks for the feedback. Just deployed a new image that only checks for the objective, not at what docker network somebody uses.

It is hard to have a checker that eliminates both false positives and false negatives in general, but we always try to minimize false negatives and we failed initially here.

Hello, SadServers guy here.

We have scenarios running on k8s, both on single VMs (the ones you can see in the scenario list) and we also have a beta/PoC k8s cluster where we currently run a couple of scenarios as single pod (a docker container) or as a full system (the "kubernetes playgrounds", which is kind of hidden while we test it).

Is this what you were wondering? we do have pending to introduce podman scenarios as well

Hello, creator here. Have you checked your dashboard? otherwise please contact us (email or form in the website) and we'll be happy to help

Hello, SadServers guy here. Free VMs are sandboxed (no way in or out other than coming in through the proxy) for security reasons. Paid accounts have VMs with internet access and SSH access (and your pub key is added to all VMs for convenience)

Checking out how the platform works was two clicks away: home -> give me a server.

I don't know of any other SaaS which gives you a VM with one click without any registration but we do it.

In any case thanks for the feedback, I've put a button on this /advent page for clarity, cheers

hello, creator here, sorry about that. In this case you can click again on the "Open the Server Terminal in a New Window" button

Advent of Code 2025 8 months ago

I haven't set up an advent event (maybe I should) but you can do yourself a challenge a day from SadServers.com

Big cloud provider (AWS, Azure, GP) is great for all the managed ecosystem; if you mostly only need raw computing (CPU, memory, bandwidth), then a provider like Hertzner makes a lot of sense (plus they have API and basic services like LB/firewall and object storage).

We at SadServers moved from big cloud managed K8s to Hetzner + Edka and it's an order of magnitude cheaper (obv some perks are missing).

Hola, I may try this out (once the HN hug of death slows down). At SadServers we ran a GKE cluster with 0.2 vCPUs workload for a PoC at it was costing us CAD $50/day until we figured out thing like GCP using a pod not doing anything just keeping a node up using 1 CPU, hidden Prometheus metrics etc.

Good food for thought but the article assumes how currently DevOps and Dev teams (and there's also an Ops team?) operate and there's a lot of different ways in how "DevOps" is done at different organizations.

Take any combination of dev, platform engineering, devops, SRE, ops teams (existing or not) and combine with different responsibilities and how they work together and there's a company out there using that model.

Heck, we don't even have a common understanding of what a "DevOps" team does https://docs.sadservers.com/blog/what-the-f-is-devops/

You area a Site Reliability Engineer and you get a page notifying your service is down and you rush to see your logs, metrics and other dashboards, start communicating in Slack and entering checking commands in a shell prompt.

In the same way pilots get put in emergency situations in flight simulators, I'm building an "SRE incident simulator" , a generalization of SadServers.

Hello, SadServers author here. Zero shame in adapting an idea you found somewhere; I'm super happy you built something useful.

I've thought of adding programming debug scenarios (I even got sadbugs.com lol), may implement in the future.

I'd love to see what you've done, please feel free to connect :-)

Thanks, pot capacity being scheduled differently would explain the behavior.

Almost all my ec2 instances are spot, and actually I can compare the distribution with the on-demand ones.

My spot instances are very short lived (15-30 mins max) and AFAIK I've never seen a spot instance force-terminated (this would be hard to find I think).