[HN Gopher] Show HN: Burst - start a cloud server, run your code...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Show HN: Burst - start a cloud server, run your code, turn it off
        
       Author : danbmil99
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2021-08-15 19:03 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (burstable.ai)
 (TXT) w3m dump (burstable.ai)
        
       | yewenjie wrote:
       | This is cool but looks like it is Python specific. Is there a
       | similar service out there for arbitrary languages?
        
         | danbmil99 wrote:
         | Great question. Initially we have focused on the Python
         | ecosystem but we certainly don't want to stop there. Jupyterlab
         | (which we have integrated support for) claims to support 100+
         | languages. While our infrastructure code is written in Python,
         | we present a CLI which is language-agnostic. We depend on
         | Docker to virtualize the environment, but again that is not
         | tied to Python.
         | 
         | If somebody wants to do some coding and testing of non-Python
         | languages, we would certainly support the effort as best we
         | can.
        
       | DonHopkins wrote:
       | I use burst with google cloud, and it works great! I especially
       | like the new Jupyter support -- I can actually run emacs in a
       | shell window in the docker container via a Jupyter notebook in
       | the browser, and it works just fine!
       | 
       | Maybe it's a bad habit and breaks the rules of encapsulation, but
       | it sure makes it easy to go in there in the first person, to see
       | what's installed, to look at the input and output and log files,
       | to diagnose what's going wrong, and to hack and debug it with
       | emacs the "old school way", which is a lot easier for me than the
       | typical "hands off" approach to docker development.
       | 
       | It's expensive to rent the big GPUs, so it's useful to go in
       | there and interactively hack the code in real time while it's
       | still running, instead of waiting for yet another docker
       | container rebuild for a tiny little tweak. Then burst syncs my
       | changes back. It also saves money to shut off the server when
       | it's not being used.
        
       | spiritplumber wrote:
       | color me ignorant, but I thought that this is how cloud servers
       | worked in the first place... now it seems to me that I can use
       | one. so thank you!
        
         | flatline wrote:
         | You typically get a dedicated VM that can scale its compute
         | resources on demand. Or have to program something serverless.
        
       | JZL003 wrote:
       | Seems pretty similar to a couple of things, not least terra
       | (although that is nominally more biology focused). Where terra
       | allows setting up pipelines for data as well
        
         | danbmil99 wrote:
         | I'm having trouble finding the product you mentioned. Can you
         | post a link?
        
           | 708733454927516 wrote:
           | here are a couple: https://app.terra.bio/
           | https://support.terra.bio/hc/en-us
        
       | danbmil99 wrote:
       | Hi, Dan and Genevieve from burstable.ai here. We created a tool
       | called burst to make on-demand cloud compute easy. This lets
       | developers access powerful machines for CPU- and GPU-intensive
       | tasks, with minimal devops overhead.
       | 
       | Using our burst CLI, you can provision a cloud VM (or restart an
       | existing one), sync your code and data, run the task, re-sync the
       | data back, and have the VM stop automatically once the task is
       | done.
       | 
       | We've also added support for running JupyterLab in the cloud,
       | with automatic timeout so you don't accidentally leave expensive
       | machines running overnight (or worse).
       | 
       | burst is an open-source project with a permissive licensing
       | model. We do intend to build a PaaS business leveraging burst
       | (the so-called "open core" business model). However, we are
       | committed to the development of burst itself as a viable FOSS
       | project. Our vision is to make simple cloud devops as transparent
       | as possible for data scientists, ML / AI researchers and the
       | like. With the support of users and contributors, this vision can
       | extend to other domains such as 3D production, video analytics
       | and more.
       | 
       | One of our beta testers, an Astrophysicist/Data Scientist, put it
       | succinctly: when it comes to devops "I treasure my ignorance".
       | Developers who are not pursuing an IT/devops career should have
       | an easy way to provision compute resources---one that is
       | predictable, and consistent across platforms. burst is our first
       | step toward that vision. We're excited to share it with you.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-08-15 23:00 UTC)