April 22, 2026
Hold my cloud
I am building a cloud
Tailscale cofounder vows to rebuild the cloud—and the comments explode
TLDR: A Tailscale cofounder unveiled exe.dev, a new cloud aiming to feel like a real computer instead of rigid plans. Commenters are split between cheering faster, saner defaults, flexing their DIY home-clouds, and grilling the team on why this beats cheap hosts and code‑based setups—making it a flashpoint for how we’ll build online next.
A founder behind Tailscale just said the quiet part out loud: “I like computers… but I don’t like the cloud,” and launched exe.dev to fix it. He argues today’s clouds feel like weirdly shaped boxes: virtual machines tied to rigid CPU/memory bundles, fancy platforms that break your app in surprising ways, and storage defaults that feel slow. His dream? Buy raw compute, memory, and disk like normal parts, then run as many virtual machines as your box can handle.
The comments immediately split into team hype and team side‑eye. One fan highlighted the everyday pain: clouds ship with “slow by default” storage—IOPS (how many reads/writes per second) that trail your laptop—while cheering the vision and admitting they’re “afraid” of the execution risk. A DIY crowd flexed hard: one user bragged they’ve basically built this at home already with Tailscale and throwaway containers—aka the “I’m the Dropbox guy” meme for infrastructure. Skeptics went procedural: why an SSH-driven setup instead of a “declare it in code” tool like OpenTofu (a popular Terraform fork)? And if it’s just cheaper, why not use budget hosts like Hetzner?
Meanwhile, a hobbyist chimed in: “I’m building my own cloud for fun,” and another simply asked, “What is this, exactly?” The vibe: builder energy vs. buyer reality—with plenty of “hold my YAML” jokes in between.
Key Points
- •The author announces they are building a new cloud company, exe.dev, alongside a fundraising announcement.
- •They are a co‑founder of Tailscale and emphasize a personal motivation: a longstanding enjoyment of computers.
- •The piece argues current cloud VMs are the wrong abstraction shape, being tied to CPU/memory allocations rather than raw resources.
- •To achieve flexibility today, users must implement isolation (e.g., with gVisor or nested virtualization) and manage added components like reverse proxies, incurring penalties.
- •PaaS offerings are criticized as provider‑specific and limiting; cloud storage defaults like remote block devices or S3 are questioned for their performance trade‑offs.