L
Lenny Gordon
lg.io · Personal blog · on HN since 2015
Lenny Gordon writes hands-on cloud and networking guides, including cloud gaming on EC2, AWS Lambda and Ubiquiti router setup.
What HN saysHN links it mostly for the guide to running a cloud gaming machine on EC2, which commenters cite when discussing cost and latency.
22HN people shared it
16linked it in comments
12stories submitted
1.4Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2015people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Revised and much faster, run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC217 people · 875 points · first shared 2015 · 231 comments on HN
- 2Cloudy Gamer: Playing Overwatch on Azure's New Monster GPU Instances3 people · 51 points · first shared 2016 · 14 comments on HN
- 3AWS Lambda as a back end for a single-page app2 people · 229 points · first shared 2015 · 73 comments on HN
- 4Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC22 people · 201 points · first shared 2015 · 71 comments on HN
- 5Using Lets Encrypt to Secure Cloud Apps Like Ubiquiti MFi, Unifi, Unifi Video1 people · 3 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 6Benchmarking Cloud Storage Providers: S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob1 people · 2 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 7Show HN: Creating a long distance phone dialer with Twilio's TwiML1 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 8Ubiquiti EdgeRouter: Configuring this low-cost enterprise-grade router for home1 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
gnode · 2018-04-18
I've done it (Steam "in-home" streaming, over OpenVPN to AWS). It's works fairly well. Latency wasn't an issue for playing Skyrim, but for competitive multiplayer FPSes it's probably a no-go. You can tune the bandwidth vs. quality in Steam.
I followed this guide: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
I found managing the VM on AWS to be a terrible pain. I may have misunderstood it, but it seems you can't just turn off a spot instance, have it persist and start it up again later. I had to snapshot the VM and make a new AMI after each run. You could possibly omit this if you don't want to persist the disk between runs.
Make sure not to accidentally leave your VM running or you'll wish you'd just bought a gaming rig; GPU instances are expensive, but it's fine for a few hours at a time.
As an alternative, I found: https://www.paperspace.com/gaming but I've not used it myself.
bdz · 2018-10-01
Alternatives
Geforce Now https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/
Parsec https://www.parsecgaming.com/
Make your own with EC2 https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
jlebrech · 2017-10-26
how much to per hour with windows?
I want to do this.
https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
WalterSear · 2017-10-17
Exactly: a few reasons.
Moreover
1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.
https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.
3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.
positr0n · 2017-08-30
People have been doing this for a while[1], so it's not required. It will just give you more flexibility in the other specs for your box.
[1]: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
balls187 · 2017-08-30
The Linux attempt was pretty successful. https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
Splines · 2017-02-28
Nvidia is also rolling out GeForce NOW: http://www.geforce.com/geforce-now
People have also rolled their own solution: https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
falsedan · 2016-02-09
run games on spot instance g2s & stream them to the sticks, ala http://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-c…
bigiain · 2015-11-21
Check things like this out: http://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-c…
If you've close enough to an AWS datacenter, you can reasonably play modern 3D games on a remote machine over the internet.
The internet is _surprisingly_ fast. There's a rant somewhere from John Carmack were he points out he can get packets to London faster than he can change pixels on his monitor...
Edit: See John Carmack's answer here: http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-s…
tomf64 · 2015-07-27
You may have seen this before, but if not it would probably interest you: http://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-c…
bshep · 2015-07-27
I used the old version of this guide, the new one may work better but I already have a working instance:
http://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-c…
AustinDizzy · 2015-05-15
I'd say do this http://lg.io/2015/04/12/run-your-own-high-end-cloud-gaming-service-on-… and make it super affordable with generous free plans.
dredmorbius · 2025-03-12
What were the arguments in favour of SPAs in the first place?
I'm finding it interesting that most of the top HN submissions (by popularity) matching "single page app" are critical, not positive. First 15 follow, all but 5 are negative:
- You probably don't need a single-page app (https://journal.plausible.io/you-probably-dont-need-a-single-page-app) 816 points | 6 years ago | 499 comments
- A single-page app is almost always worse than a multi-page app (https://www.gregnavis.com/articles/the-architecture-no-one-needs.html) 289 points | 6 years ago | 145 comments
- The myth that you can’t build interactive web apps except as single page app (https://htmx.org/essays/you-cant/) 262 points | 4 months ago | 143 comments
- Building a single-page app with Htmx (https://jakelazaroff.com/words/building-a-single-page-app-with-htmx/) 252 points | 5 months ago | 143 comments
- AWS Lambda as a back end for a single-page app (http://lg.io/2015/05/16/the-future-is-now-and-its-using-aws-lambda.htm… 229 points | 10 years ago | 73 comments
- Create your own dysfunctional single-page app (https://tinnedfruit.com/articles/create-your-own-dysfunctional-single-… 208 points | 6 years ago | 138 comments
- The Single-Page-App Morality Play (https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/single-page-app-morality-play/) 207 points | 3 years ago | 131 comments
- Todos: a Backbone.js example Single-Page-App (with…
umyemri · 2019-03-19
I don't know, I worked in the gaming industry as well. Only left last year, but even then I was seeing a growing desire to move to host systems: https://nexus.vert.gg/gaming-on-amazon-s-ec2-83b178f47a34 or https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-own-highend-…
Larry Land even started working on Azure solutions. They were more stable, however, more expensive.
With all that said, there's definitely an interest to be hardware light. So this move into a hosted service should probably be pioneered by the big three hosts: AWS, Azure and Google. They are the biggest consumers of hardware at the moment. And have a hell of a lot more financial backup then Onlive (who only had one product to sell). Xbox has but to partner with their Azure counterparts. Although, I grant you there's probably little incentive due to them being hardware sellers.
All this hardware could have been used for better purposes, of course. Like AI training or Pharma... but like in Stross' Accelerando - it's all going to be used to run economics 2.0 anyway.