The other day I was talking with someone here in Estonia who is working on a similar system that looks at real-world AWS usage and moves customer machines on to reserved instances, using a marketplace so customers don't have to take on the 12-month commitment of a "real" reserved instance.
It looks like a new wave of AI-enabled cost-cutting cloud startups is emerging. Exciting times!
Hmm it seems curious that this attack on a successful Ukrainian startup is happening at this time.
Could it be a Russian smear campaign? It seems like the sort of thing that the St Petersburg disinformation teams would attempt, in very subtle ways...
Yes here too, and I think it's great and it's the way forward, but as with anything it requires some changes in thinking and approach. Re-composing everything into small functions, queues, and asynchronous events takes some getting used to. And there are some patterns that can help (e.g. using "job queues" can sometimes be the answer, rather than having a different queue for every type of action), when to use FIFO vs unstructured queues, and lots more.
Books like https://www.manning.com/books/serverless-architectures-on-aw... might help. And of course many consultants, good and bad, will cash in on the new trend, and there will be some high-profile disasters which should never have chosen serverless in the first place.
Thanks for the link. Anything by Yan Cui is definitely worth a read!
I'd argue the most important value prop that serverless has had for us was to force us think of everything in terms of an event-driven process, with small batches of job being done at every invocation. This is such an underrated benefit of going serverless/event-driven: together with job queues, this has enabled us to maintain control of our jobs from outside the code, without a need for re-deployment. We can fast-forward, pause, stop, rewind our long-running jobs simply by changing the event triggers or sending a new message to the queue.
As the articles say, he has been under investigation for a while for his bitcoin mining work (which as far as I can tell is not under dispute). The Australian government has decreed that all bitcoin "investments" should be taxed for capital gains [1] so he could be up for a huge tax bill on his paper "profits" even if he was just mining back in the early days.
I know it's a bit OT but if anyone really does want to charge for offering skills in this way, you should check out a startup called www.minutebox.com which offers pay-by-the-minute video calls which are intended to work like this.
Props to these guys for doing it for free! I hope it works out for you.
Unfortunately, we don't have any plans to launch in the UK in the short term. It's too hard to build the competitive marketplace we need to do in each country. We're launching Canada later this week.
If you're still at Cal then you should talk to international house, they would know lots of good visa consultants etc -- but on the other hand they have to play by the book as they could jeopardize their entire visa sponsorship programme if they do anything wrong... so you won't learn any dirty tricks from them. But maybe you could get work as a tutor etc which would let you stay in the country..?
One of the things required for the H1B is a Labor Certification Application (LCA) where the employer has to demonstrate that they have tried to find americans who could fulfill any position offered, and failed. Unless you're tutoring in a very specialized area, its unlikely they could do that.
It's about writing fiction, but I think we can learn a lot from people who spend years holed up in a loft with a laptop typing out tens of thousands of words that may or may not ever be seen by anyone.
One theme that resonated with me is that you should try to get to something you can vaguely call "finished" as soon as you can: have something on the page that you can then come back and edit, refactor, tinker with. Might help. Good luck.
It looks like a new wave of AI-enabled cost-cutting cloud startups is emerging. Exciting times!