The Pragmatic Engineer

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2024-10-17 17:30:07

Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover topics related to Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. In this article, we cover one section from this week’s from last week’s The Pulse issue. To get full issues twice a week, subscribe here.

There is an increasing number of cloud providers offering the ability to rent virtual machines, the largest being AWS, GCP, and Azure. Other popular services include Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Germany-based Hetzner, France-headquartered OVH, and Scaleway. Virtual machine pricing across these providers can get confusing – and wildly different!

A startup called Spare Cores attempts to help compare prices between AWS, GCP, Azure and Hetzner by monitoring offerings in close to realtime. The name comes from the concept of “spare cores:” machines currently unused, which can be reclaimed at any time, that cloud providers tend to offer at a steep discount to keep server utilization high.

Interested in how the site works, and what the business model is for a service like this, I reached out to Spare Cores founder Gergely Daróczi, who shared in-depth details about the company, including lots of specifics about the tech stack.