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This is a cool idea. I also like the website, very clean looking, congrats.

I do have some questions: can the owner of a server split it any way they want ? For example if I have a 64 GB server with 16 cores (something OVH provides IIRC) can I split it into 32 2GB/0.5CPU VM ? (assuming firecracker can handle fractions of a CPU, I don’t know). This could make for some really cheap VM compared to even OVH’s offering.

For that matter do you only support certain types of server or can the owner choose any server they want from Hetzner or OVH ?




So it was just a weekend of coding so far, lots more to do. Right now I have everything hard coded to just split into half based on my example server of 64, 4, 400. If you look at the script:

https://github.com/andrewarrow/shellmates/blob/main/firecrac...

You can see lots of hard coded stuff just to get it to work at Hetzner on rockylinux9. I think I can make the script a lot more customizable in the UI and let you do all sort of fancy splits! Firecracker does support fractional CPU allocation through CPU shares and quota settings. When you configure a Firecracker microVM, you can specify:

CPU shares (relative weight)

CPU quota (maximum usage in microseconds per period)

CPU period (measurement period in microseconds)

As long as the server has rockylinux9 I think it should work anywhere!


Oh I didn’t realize it was open source.

The wording « We help you setup Firecracker VMs » made me think it was a SaaS at first but maybe I was mistaken. Is the idea that a community should host its own instance of shellmates ?


Anyone's welcome to run their own on another domain. Would be so cool to see someone do this. shellmates.com is for sale $5k!

I'll keep running on the subdomain of https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev/ because I don't want to spend any more money on another domain lol.




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