I am a fan of Rackspace Spot, and use it personally. It started out being a pure play Kubernetes cluster provider, but recently they added support for VMs.
I was so impressed by its pricing and efforts at transparency that it motivated me to learn Kubernetes. I finally achieved the "cattle, not pets" nirvana. My Kubernetes cluster running a demo service costs me $14/month: $4/month for the spot instance, $10/month for the load balancer, and $free Kubernetes control plane (non-redundant; not intended for production). $14/month is an amazing value, as long as you know the limitations.
Although this article greatly emphasizes Rackspace's market-based prices, they do have some price controls. First, they have a reserve (floor) price on their compute. In their older data centers, it's $0.001/hr ($1/mo), while in their newer data centers it's 10x higher: $0.01/hr ($7/mo). Second, their bidding UI supports bids only in increments of $0.005/hr, so you actually can't bid $0.001: $0.005/hr ($4/mo) is the lowest supported. If everyone bids $0.005/hr to start, then is $0.001/hr even achievable as a market-clearing price?
Secondly, their pricing is not as sweet on everything else beyond spot compute. Load balancers are $10/mo each. On-demand instances are comparable to on-demand pricing in other cloud providers. (A 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM instance in the older data center costs $27/mo; almost equal to AWS t4g EC2 instance with the same vCPU/RAM combo.)
Today I run a POC web service on Rackspace Spot, and I pay $14/month; this is the lowest achievable price on Rackspace Spot, and it is not production-quality.
If you run a production web service, your costs grow to $40/mo (redundant Kubernetes control plane) + $27/mo (on-demand cheapest instance) + $10/mo (load balancer) = $77/mo at a minimum. You'll also be paying for storage, but I don't include that. Spot instances don't even play a role here.
Is that still a great value compared to other providers? I am not sure. If it is, then Rackspace Spot marketing is focusing on the wrong thing. And if it's not a great value anymore, then it makes sense only if your workload is heavily dependent on interruptible compute.
I was also infuriated by this, so much so that I switched to TIDAL. Migrating was easy— I used their recommended webapp ti migrate all my playlists. Have been using TIDAL happily ever since. Never any popups or ads.
Amazon and its Delivery Service Partners (DSPs) employ thousands of drivers. These drivers are overworked and are owed thousands in wages a year, sacrificing their safety for speed and efficiency.
Our report focuses on this workplace surveillance technology, and how it makes these jobs worse for drivers and our communities.
To better wrap my head around how FOKS facilitates team collaboration, I'd like to see two comparisons:
1) compare to a team-shared Linux machine with SSH daemon. Each team member has a user account, and they can manage their SSH authorized keys, including keys stored on Yubikey. The team can share files and git repositories on the Linux machine's own storage. Some differences I see with this approach are the federated aspect and "append-only data structures that allow clients to catch dishonest server behavior".
2) compare to Radicle, a decentralized git service. Identities are keypairs.
With FOKS, how coupled is storage of git and secrets to the FOKS server?
I'm not familiar with Radicle, but I'll check it out. For (1), consider the case of that server being hosted on AWS. Even though only members are authorized to SSH into it, the plaintext is still known to the cloud hardware, and can be exfiltrated that way. In FOKS, the server sees encrypted data only, so that attack is greatly mitigated. I would say that if the SSH server was hosted on one of the workstations of one of the team members, then the security advantages of FOKS would be much less.
The KV-Store and Git server are implemented as "applications" on top of the FOKS infrastructure, so they aren't coupled. They see a sequence of Per-Team-Keys (PTKs); they use the older ones for decryption and the newest for encryption. I'd really love to see all sorts of other applications built on top of FOKS but we might need to do some work as to nailing the right plugin architecture.
Everyone now has fondness for these and for thin clients in general, but I don’t see this concept used in modern times. Is there any modern equivalent, in particular with the power of a workstation rather than a kiosk? Amazon’s WorkSpaces is anemic— low memory and high price, with their own marketing proposing it for contact centers and front desks. What modern thin client solution can truly replace full computers, especially with local / on-prem processing?
minor nitpick, but it's not ownership so much as location. Sometimes the ISP will own the equipment, but it will be located on the customer premises rather than the ISP premises. It's an important distinction as you can't just rock up and do stuff to it.
