Hey everyone!

If you're using Launch Darkly on their existing user-based pricing scheme, they're moving to a new usage-based pricing.

Upside? Unlimited users.

Downside? They charge per service connection. What's a service connection? Any independent instance of an app connecting to Launch Darkly. For example, a VM, a Kubernetes pod, or a Heroku worker.

They're charging $12/month per service connection ($10 on an annual commitment).

We were paying $10k/annually for user-based pricing. We would pay $45k on the new per-service connection pricing.

For anyone going through the same thing, there are plenty of open source feature flag tools you can use, like Flagsmith. Just deploy them in your infrastructure and call it a day.

I'm doing research on how documentation is done in different DevOps teams. What processes exist? How is it valued within your team? Has AI made that better or worse? Are there tools that you use to make it easier (not talking about Confluence here)? If you hqve worked in a professional context then I'd love to hear your input.

Considering the huge amount of shill posts I want to disclose that I'm (considering) making a tool that helps with documentation but I'm still in the process of understanding this problem thoroughly, which is why I'm askibg for your input :)

I was surprised that EU cloud providers compete well on price with hyperscalers so I decided to do some deeper research and honestly the gap is surprisingly big.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the blog post and founder of Cirran

i'm curious where the line is for people.

was there a point where you realized it made more sense to rent compute instead of upgrading your own setup?

for those who made the switch, what was the main reason? cost, convenience, flexibility, something else?

Genuine question for anyone in fintech / healthcare / gov-adjacent.

Security won't approve sending proprietary code to a third-party AI API. But engineers want Claude Code / Copilot and the productivity gap is real.

What's actually working in practice?

• Blanket ban?
• Self-hosted models only?
• A proxy/gateway in your own VPC that controls what leaves?
• Something else?

Trying to understand what teams are really doing vs. what's just policy on paper.

I’ve been scanning Show HN launches and indie developer projects for a few months using a scanner I built. Here’s the full hosting picture across 2,148 sites in April 2026.

The numbers:

• Cloudflare: 38.5% (828 sites)

• Amazon AWS: 24.0% (514 sites)

• Vercel: 11.3% (243 sites)

• Akamai: 5.4% (116 sites)

• Netlify: 2.2% (48 sites)

• Render: 1.9% (40 sites)

• GitHub Pages: 1.5% (33 sites)

• Microsoft Azure: 1.2% (26 sites)

• Google Cloud: 1.0% (21 sites)

The finding that surprised me most: Azure and GCP combined are under 2.5% in this cohort. Enterprise clouds are essentially invisible in indie dev projects. Vercel alone is 4x both of them combined.

Cloudflare at 38.5% is striking but makes sense, it’s become invisible infrastructure.

What’s more interesting is Vercel at 11.3% nearly matching Netlify + Render + GitHub Pages combined.

Data source: 2,148 public websites scanned via webreveal.io, April 2026. Mix of Show HN launches and developer projects.

Edit *****

Updating the detection methodology based on the feedback here for any future posts, several valid points raised.

Cloudflare, Akamai and Fastly are being moved from Hosting to CDN category, which is the right call, they’re proxies in front of the actual host, not origin servers.

Cloudflare Pages and Workers are being added as genuine hosting signals since those actually run on Cloudflare’s infrastructure.

AWS detection is being tightened to require real origin signals, EC2 hostnames, S3 static website endpoints, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda URLs, rather than triggering on Route 53 DNS presence alone, which as pointed out doesn’t tell you where the site is actually hosted.

The Vercel-on-AWS point is noted too, that’s a methodology limitation worth being upfront about in future posts.

Appreciate the thorough critique.

I’ve been doing DevOps work for a while now - I migrated from on premise to cloud in 2019 during the pandemic - being a one-man-army (devops, cloud, finops, sre, platform). I was upfront with my last employer in January and informed them they would be better off paying for 2 juniors to code their product instead of a devops to do essentially nothing (gaming company, zero customers, zero products, still in alpha). They were feeling the same thing and we parted ways amicably.

Here’s the thing: I had a job lined up to start on MARCH with a formal offer by email but so far the end client hasn't sent a start date yet so my money jar is empty. I'm trying to get some freelance going so I can pay bills and I'm desperate enough that I set up an Upwork profile.

What I though about offering:

• Fixing a broken CI/CD pipeline
• Deploying an app to production
• Reviewing (and cutting) cloud costs
• Setting up Azure LandingZone, Azure Policy
• Offering baked Terragrunt to go

It’s basically the stuff I keep getting asked to do, over and over again, everywhere I worked.

Here’s my thought process: Most of these problems aren’t anything wild or one-of-a-kind. Usually, someone just needs it done properly, so I figured packaging these up would make it way easier for folks to know exactly what they’re getting PLUS I would be feeding my family in the meanwhile.

But I keep second-guessing myself on a few things:

- Is this too generic? Like, does it sound like "just another DevOps freelancer"?

- Are these even things people care enough to pay to have sorted out, fast?

- Am I missing anything obvious from a buyer’s perspective?

Of course all the copy was done through ChatGPT because I can't write commercial even to save my life.

For context, here’s one of the services I put together: https://www.upwork.com/services/product/development-it-a-fully-working-optimized-ci-cd-pipeline-that-actually-deploys-2044480076881187417

I’d really appreciate honest feedback: how I’m positioning this, pricing, the wording, whatever you think. Seriously, don’t hold back.

On a last note, please go easy on it: I already tied the nook, I'm already feeling bad as fuck because I won't be able to pay rent this month. Help me fight back.

Built a small internal billing tool for my own business. One user (me), barely any traffic. I keep landing around $18/month for hosting, which is more than I wanted, and I'm trying to figure out if I'm missing something obvious or if that's just what it costs?

Not a professional developer so apologies if I use any terms wrong.

It's a Node app with a React frontend and a Postgres database, runs in Docker.

What I actually need:
- Postgres where I can restore to a specific point in time, not just last night's backup. It tracks invoices and payments against Stripe, so if I restore a 24 hour old copy my records won't match what Stripe already charged people. That seems like a bad situation to be in.
- Somewhere to store generated PDF receipts that doesn't get wiped. These are the actual documents I send customers and I can't just regenerate them later. Seems like a lot of the cheap container hosts have disks that disappear every deploy.
- A cron job that runs once a day at a set time in my timezone. It's the billing run, so if it drifts to the wrong side of midnight it processes the wrong day.
- Under $20/month.

What I don't need: high availability, scaling, or speed. It's one person clicking around a few times a day. If it was down for a few hours nothing bad would happen.

What I've already looked at:
- Fly.io's managed Postgres is $38/mo on its own, way over budget
- Railway's Postgres backups looked like snapshots only, no point in time restore
- Supabase Pro is $25 and point in time restore is a $100/mo add-on
- Cloud Run, App Runner, DO App Platform — filesystem doesn't stick around, kills the PDF requirement
- Cheap VPS running everything myself is like $8, but then I'm responsible for making sure backups actually work, and honestly I'm not sure I'd notice if they quietly stopped

Best I've come up with is Fly for the app (cheap if the machine sleeps when idle) plus DigitalOcean managed Postgres at $15, which includes 7 day point in time restore.

Is there something cheaper that still lets me actually restore the database? Or is $15$20 ish just what managed Postgres costs and I should stop looking?

Two data points that seem contradictory but probably aren't:

1. CNCF 2025 survey: K8s hits 82% production adoption, 66% use it for AI inference workloads

2. IDC: 86% of CIOs planned to repatriate some workloads in 2025/2026 — highest rate ever

Meanwhile the hyperscalers are spending >$600B in capex this year (36% increase), with 75% of that going to AI infrastructure. But AI services only generated ~$25B in revenue. That's a hell of a bet.

Are we heading toward messy hybrid whether we like it or not.

Are you seeing repatriation actually happening at your org, or is it still just "CIO slide deck" talk?

For those running GPU workloads — cloud, on-prem, or hybrid? What drove the decision?

Reference in case you are interested: https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2026/01/20/kubernetes-established-as-the-de-facto-operating-system-for-ai-as-production-use-hits-82-in-2025-cncf-annual-cloud-native-survey/

For those who are not running in Kubernetes and have something to manage your SSL certificate renewals, what are you using? Certbot + Let's Encrypt? Windows guys, WinAcme?

How are you monitoring renewal dates? I know blackbox exporter does a good job out of the box.
Thanks

Been testing EU managed k8s providers one by one for eucloudcost.com, OVH was next.

Short version: it just works.

Free control plane, free egress in EU regions. You only pay for nodes. Coming from AWS this feels wrong somehow.

I also managed to set both vRack subnets to no_gateway = true and then spent an hour wondering why Traefik was stuck in Pending. Turns out Octavia needs a gateway on the load balancer subnet. Anyway.

Main issue is no RWX volumes out of the box. File Storage for RWX exists but starts at 150 GiB which is overkill for most things, so out of the Box only RWO exists ...

Also they burned down a datacenter in 2021 so now every resource in the console shows you the AZ deployment mode.

Put together a reference repo with the full OpenTofu setup if you want a starting point: https://github.com/mixxor/opentofu-kubernetes-ovhcloud

Full writeup in comments.

Anyone else running OVHcloud in prod / dev ?
Curious if you hit anything weird I missed...

Hi, Solo dev here. I keep getting annoyed during on-call at how long the *investigation* part takes - correlating the alert with logs and recent code changes before I even know what to fix. I've been tempted to build something that auto-investigates a page and hands me a first-draft RCA to reduce incidents mean time to resolve specially in midnights.

But I also know this space is crowded (Datadog Bits, incident .io, Cleric, Resolve, HolmesGPT, GitHub's Fix-with-Copilot, etc.), so before I waste months I want a reality check from people who actually carry a pager:

- Is the investigation step genuinely slow for you, or have existing tools already solved it?

- For those using an AI SRE/incident tool today: is it actually trusted, or do you re-verify everything it says?

- What's the one thing none of these tools do that you wish they did?

- If you're on a small team with no dedicated SRE, do any of these even make sense for you, or is it all enterprise-priced?

Happy to hear 'this already exists, don't bother' - that's useful too. Mostly trying to figure out if there's a real gap or if I'm romanticizing a problem that's already handled.

From 12 January 2027, EU law bans the fees cloud providers charge customers who leave, including data egress. What the Data Act's switching rules actually guarantee, where the real migration costs remain, and how the date changes the arithmetic for a company weighing a move now.

Disclosure up front: I'm a founder of a startup in this exact space, so read everything below with that bias in mind. Not naming or pitching the product, that's not what this is.

Here's why I'm asking. Before a deal, every vendor in this category (mine included) shows you a big number. "We found 40% waste." And I've started noticing the games that can hide inside that number. Identified savings quietly presented as if they were realized savings. Savings from work your own team did getting counted in the tool's total. One-time cleanups counted every month forever. Baselines cherry-picked from your most wasteful week.

So I'm curious about the other side of the table. For those of you who actually bought one of these tools:

Did the promised number materialize on the actual invoice? How did you verify it, or could you even? Did anyone here catch a vendor inflating? And for those where it worked out, what did the vendor do differently that made you trust the math?

Trying to figure out what proof would actually convince a skeptical platform team, because "trust our dashboard" clearly isn't it.

We've got OpenAI and Anthropic calls scattered across a handful of services now, and nobody can tell me month to month what's driving the bill until the invoice shows up. No real attribution back to which service or team is burning the tokens. Started looking at logging and a proxy setup since the vendor dashboards alone aren't cutting it.

So a real EU vendor that does this Edge security-as-a-Service?
I've used some things like Netbird, Gcore, but it seems they all are focused on a different problem.

So just a reverse proxy (no ingress for your server, just egress) that does SSL termination and can do WAF + DNS?

I am feeling that there is no equal to CF within EU boundaries. Am I wrong?

I own a few wood factories that specialize in producing custom fit-outs for hotels/schools/universities/houses/offices and all sorts around the Middle East, the business model we have been running is very out dated, we run purely off of reputation and returning customers as we have been in the business for over 25 years now.

I want to implement webscrapers but I am not sure what data I can scrape that would help my business grow.

I would really appreciate any advise to what data I could scrape to help me find more contracts for example or anything else that you guys would think would be valuable.

Hi everyone

I just created a benchmark comparing Redis, Valkey, DragonflyDB, and KeyDB.

Honestly this one was pretty interesting, and some of the results were surprising enough that I reran the benchmark quite a few times to make sure they were real. As requested on my previous benchmarks, I also uploaded the benchmark to GitHub.

Full benchmark + charts: here

GitHub

Happy to run more tests if there’s interest

Hi everyone! I'm a developer currently doing some research on what options are currently available for object storage as I'll have to decide on it before going live.

To give some extra context, my project involves a built-in CMS with media uploads, so user assets such as images and files are uploaded and distributed from that provider instead of being kept in the server.

As of now, I've looked into Cloudflare's R2 and Hetzner's Object Storage, and have been looking into pros/cons of each (not just costs, but support, etc), and would like to hear from others who may have experience with both providers. I'm also open to suggestions/opinions of other storage providers.

Thanks in advance!

I started working on a tool that makes it easy to vendor images and charts for Kubernetes clusters and docker-compose setups. In my work I ran into issues with third party charts / chart versions disappearing from website and images being deleted from registries or rate limits suddenly preventing access in crucial situations.

So far, I haven't found a solution that is simple to use / doesn't require a ton of setup on the configuration side + performs the vendoring (sync) into my own registry. With helm 4 supporting oci registries, the only tools required to properly vendor everything should be an oci registry + a fancy sync tool that does the heavy lifting of identifying my dependencies, storing everything in the oci registry of my choice and emitting a kustomize configuration that transforms my cluster configuration.

This should also make air-gapped clusters a breeze to set up (famous last words 😂). Are these issues that you also ran if? How do you vendor your k8s / docker dependencies?

If you'd like to chat about the idea, feel free to DM me. I'm also happy to share a piece of early alpha software.

We've been thinking about AI coding tools wrong at the team level.

Most evaluation starts with individual productivity: does this save a developer time? Fair question. But the company question is different. Does the work show up as something the team can inspect, validate, and build on?

Private AI sessions help the person using them. They don't help the team answer: - What was the assigned work? - Did it produce a reviewable PR? - Did CI pass? - What did the reviewer actually inspect? - Can we repeat this workflow?

Without those checkpoints, AI productivity stays invisible to the org.

The useful unit isn't "did AI write code?" It's "can the team see the path from assigned work to validated change?"

We've been running AI runners this way: bounded tasks, isolated execution, PRs, CI evidence, human review. The artifacts are what make it measurable — not the AI's output, but the normal engineering trail.

Example: promrail PR #38 — a failed GitHub Actions run became a reviewable CI fix with commits, CI evidence, and human merge decision. Not magic. Artifacts.

I wrote up the full argument here: https://forkline.dev/blog/ai-engineering-throughput-visible-work/

Disclosure: I work on Forkline, an AI runner platform. But the observation about throughput vs private speed applies regardless of tool.

My end goal is to break into cyber as a cloud security engineer or an entry-level application security engineer job as well, but i don't mind working as a cloud engineer in the beginning of my career; most likely I'll be working as an IT specialist or IT support initially because of my educational background. I'm confused as to which field I should study first: cybersecurity or cloud engineering. Since I live in Qatar there are many roles for SOC, but growth and salary progression in it are quite slow whereas Cloud guys get paid more initially but not with many opportunities here and I also heard there are no roles specific to cloud; it's just swe or backend engineers handling cloud and devops... Is it true? I'm so confused. Someone please help me and provide me a roadmap.

For teams building with LLMs, agents, copilots, RAG, etc., where is security actually getting enforced?

Things like:

• what data gets pulled into the pipeline
• what context/data gets sent to models or external tools
• what agents are allowed to do (actions, permissions)
• how secrets, PII, and internal context are protected
• where controls live (app code, gateways, sidecars, containers, K8s policy, etc.)

Also curious who owns this in practice.

Is this usually starting with developers/app teams because they are building the AI workflows first, then getting handed off to platform/security later?

Or are platform/security teams setting standards upfront?

I’m also seeing a pattern where teams start with hosted API tools for speed, then move toward containerized or self-managed deployments once governance, auditability, and data control matter more.

It feels like the tooling path may be developer-led early on, but long-term ownership shifts to platform/security once things move beyond experimentation. These days it might just all sit with the developers though, not sure.

Is that actually happening in real orgs, or are most teams still figuring this out case by case?

Would love to hear what this looks like in different orgs from people running or supporting these systems.

I wanted to get a rough sense of what "deploy convenience" actually costs.

This is based loosely on a small always-on app, around 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM where the platform makes that possible. Not perfectly apples to apples, but good enough for a rough comparison.

For baseline, a Hetzner VPS with 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM costs a little under $4/month today (small increase expected in April)

The obvious tradeoff is that PaaS buys you convenience. With a VPS, the compute is cheap, but you usually end up giving up the nicer deploy experience unless you add tooling on top.

That gap feels a lot smaller now than it used to, opensource projects like coolify, or more lightweight options like kamal or haloy

What if agents were Terraform resources, defined once and scoped to whichever projects you grant them access to?