exe.dev shows agents need VMs, not containers (with David Crawshaw)

Introducing exe - a brand-new cloud provider. (literally 6 months old)In this interview I talk to David Crawshaw, CEO & co-founder of exe.dev. David has a ton of systems programming experience given he co-founded and was the CTO of Tailscale. Before that, he had impactful contributions in his 8-year stint at Google where he worked on Golang, petabyte-scale log processing and implemented TCP/IP in Fuchsia (an OS by Google)Now he's building exe - a novel, incredibly dev-friendly cloud that lets you spin up VMs instantly at no extra cost. Users purchase resources (CPU, memory, disk) and share them seamlessly along VMs. In this interview, we discuss how the game has changed with AI, what current clouds lack and why VMs (not docker) are the right abstraction for sandboxing, experimentation and toy projects.What surprised me most when I tried exe.dev was how polished it looked for its age. It went public less than 6 months ago. --------------------------------------------------------------------TIMELINE0:00 why build a new cloud?2:07 why Docker isn't enough for agents12:28 AI-friendly is developer-friendly20:32 why VMs are the right abstraction28:30 the exorbitant price of IOPS in the cloud32:21 Cloud Discounts33:40 rise of Self hosting41:25 Shelly and AI ops agents48:10 the hard problem with AI SREs53:00 Parting Thoughts (and early EC2’s noisy neighbor shenanigans)-----------------------------------------DAVIDYou can find David on:- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/crawshaw/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/crawshaw/]- X: https://x.com/davidcrawshaw [https://x.com/davidcrawshaw]- GitHub: https://github.com/crawshaw [https://github.com/crawshaw]--------------------------------------------------------------------EXE.DEVYou can try the product here for 7 days no credit card: http://exe.dev/ [http://exe.dev/]I recommend it, the UX is great.Here's an example how I created a Kafka cluster: https://x.com/kozlovski/status/2050943790580457646/video/1 [https://x.com/kozlovski/status/2050943790580457646/video/1] or https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7456699132351582208/ [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7456699132351582208/]--------------------------------------------------------------------TRANSCRIPTFeed this into your favorite AI for summarization, or to prompt it specific questions:https://gist.githubusercontent.com/stanislavkozlovski/265dcf06d9f51721e7fd2b38a39593ca/raw/642b9c528fac5d1f09446e1412827801fd98cbd5/foo.md [https://gist.githubusercontent.com/stanislavkozlovski/265dcf06d9f51721e7fd2b38a39593ca/raw/642b9c528fac5d1f09446e1412827801fd98cbd5/foo.md]--------------------------------------------------------------------OTHER PLATFORMSWatch on YouTube here:https://youtu.be/1GX18UGoJRw [https://youtu.be/1GX18UGoJRw]Apple Podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/topicpartition/id1814926834 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/topicpartition/id1814926834]General RSS:https://anchor.fm/s/104fd76e0/podcast/rss [https://anchor.fm/s/104fd76e0/podcast/rss]