fduran

(SadServers guy here) happy to help!

I've called that "Organization as Code" some years back :-)

Hello, SadServers author here. Zero shame in adapting an idea you found somewhere; I'm super happy you built something useful.

I've thought of adding programming debug scenarios (I even got sadbugs.com lol), may implement in the future.

I'd love to see what you've done, please feel free to connect :-)

Thanks, pot capacity being scheduled differently would explain the behavior.

Almost all my ec2 instances are spot, and actually I can compare the distribution with the on-demand ones.

My spot instances are very short lived (15-30 mins max) and AFAIK I've never seen a spot instance force-terminated (this would be hard to find I think).

Yes, some internal (AWS operation) explanation like the one you suggest makes sense.

So I've created ~300k ec2 instances with SadServers and my experience was that starting an ec2 VM from stopped took ~30 seconds and creating one from AMI took ~50 seconds.

Recently I decided to actually look at boot times since I store in the db when the servers are requested and when they become ready and it turns out for me it's really bi-modal; some take about 15-20s and many take about 80s, see graph https://x.com/sadservers_com/status/1782081065672118367

Pretty baffled by this (same region, same pretty much everything), any idea why?. Definitively going to try this trick in the article.

Oh hi, author here, AMA :-)

I'm happy that a lot of people use and find SadServers beneficial while not costing me a lot of money. Still a lot of features to implement on the website and a shrinking backlog of scenario ideas to materialize (if somebody has ideas for Linux/Docker/Kubernetes etc troubleshooting scenarios, please let me know).

yes good catch (I should forbid internet access to this end point), poor queue is waiting on VM up but there's no quota left until other VMs are garbaged-collected.

A few people have suggested offering content offline as a Docker image etc, good idea, thanks.

Oh that reminds me, I loved the original Stripe CTF, it's been 10 years already! https://twitter.com/fduran/status/240321390698442753

Didn't know about this, thanks!

Didn't know about this one. There's quite a few labs/sandbox SaaS but what I've seen so far is that they are more for training with a "follow the recipe" model (do this do that to configure something, rather than "this (real) server is broken, fix it (with possibly different solutions)" which imho is more real-life and useful.

Thanks, I've been looking at WASM, for ex https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm/tree/main/packages/... , it would certainly simplify everything to "download a fat file".

Hi, not sure what the question means, I came up with the scenarios not copying from leetcode if that's what you mean.

There are ways to cheat but not so simple; there's a script that checks for the solution and a hash of the script is checked for modifications.

I wanted to do full VMs rather than Docker images but yes I could do Docker images or dedicated big instances with VMs on top like somebody else is suggesting.

Yes thanks!

Thanks, I did some stress-testing and infra is scalable enough but I forgot about the AWS quotas, my bad. Quota increase requested and servers are killed off so hopefully "soon" the issue will go away.

That doesn't mean that I'd charge individual users :-)

Heck, I'm not even asking for an email (and I had to do extra session management coding for that).

Yes, HN effect lol-sob.

Mitigation: reducing servers life time temporarily so more people can try.

This is a good example of "Organization as Code", where you are trying to influence a non-trivial change (often "cultural") by code.

Frequently it's better to change behaviour this way than say, holding meetings and presentations.

A typical example is "we want our developer to write more tests" but there are few existing examples of test code to look at and when you write a test it takes forever to run, so you fix this by fixing the underlaying issues (which is bad or non-existing code), rather than making developers attend TDD presentations and just talking about a "test culture" for example.

I have a checklist with a Trello version too so items can be checked off or easily removed (or new ones added): http://www.fduran.com/blog/web-site-launch-checklist/

A chess-playing computer had been suggested as early as 1864, and the first machine able to carry out a "program" was invented in Spain in 1914 by the engineer Leonardo Torres-Quevedo and called Ajedrecista http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista

In my case it was 5 hours http://www.fduran.com/blog/honeypots/ so although that's just another anecdote if you put up a server with an obvious dictionary ssh password, expect it to be compromised within hours.

Asimov wrote an essay in 1973 "The Ancient and the Ultimate" about a portable reading device that didn't need power etc; it turned out it was the book.

I just want to mention the great safety advances in car (and race) security in the last 20 years; since 1994 and the deaths of Ratzenberger and Senna there has been no driver fatalities in F1 racing.

edit "Following Senna's death in 1994, no driver had died from injuries sustained in a World Championship-related accident until María de Villota died in 2013 from complications of injuries she sustained in a testing accident the previous year"

I created http://site2pic.com/ a couple years ago, it also hosts the screenshots. Not sure what to do with it.

US football and football/soccer fields/pitches are about the same length (~100m)

I didn't take an English test when I applied as a skill worker for permanent residency (it's not my first language). It was heavily recommended to do so but I wrote a page outlining my work experience in the US, other test results etc and I didn't have any problem.

It was a bit risky because it was up to the official reviewing the application to accept it or not but I didn't feel like spending a grand and flying to another city for a day to take a test.

I don't know if things have changed and now a test is required without exception; all data indicate that not knowing well the country's language(s) is the main factor for not succeeding in it as an immigrant.

Note that besides all their indications, for CloudFlare "down" means returning some specific HTTP error codes, not that the server itself is down (as in "completely unresponsive" or not running), I was burnt by this and they actually changed the wording in their documents when I pointed it out.