Show HN: Bridgeflare – Replace Docker with Cloudflare

Show HN: Bridgeflare – Replace Docker with Cloudflare(github.com)

1 points by hypendev 11 days ago | 2 comments

Hey HN, I have way too many sideprojects so docker images have been eating up most of my RAM, but besides "deploy them" there isn't much I can do during development to cut it down.

So I build Bridgeflare - a drop-in docker replacement that serves the containers on Cloudflare then tunnels them back to you as localhost.

It basically a small daemon that uses the Docker API, so you can just keep using normal docker CLI commands and bridgeflare will do the work underneath:

- Build your image

- Deploy to CF containers

- Setup tunneling across services

- Tunnel them back safely to your machine so you see them as `localhost`

- Small MacOS menu bar to monitor the running containers for ease of use

In a way, it's like the reverse of CF's recently released quick tunnels.

As always, it is early and there are some limits:

- Images need to be amd64 based (CF containers limits)

- No docker exec

- No post-lifecycle persistence

speakingmoistly 11 days ago |

Assuming you've shifted containers you ran locally over to this, what do the economics of it look like?

hypendev 10 days ago | |

Depending on the plan and amount of work. Bridgeflare stops your containers after idling for 10 minutes then boots them up again once needed (to avoid burning money), so if you're already on the 5$ plan and doing normal workloads, it should fit in the plan.

If you're running them live 24/7, then costs can be in 40-70 dollar range, depending on the workload done/type of instances.

All of my usage last few months has been in the 5$ plan, as they go idle as soon as I stop testing and come back up when I need to test.