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Work · alternatives · 2026

WR

24 alternatives to We're building a search engine for GCP

Hi HN, I previously wore SWE/SRE hats on GCP. Later, I was on the other side, managing thousands of machines. The friction points of onboarding and operating cloud systems are personal problems to me. I’ve found it hard to keep track of all the random cloud resources floating around, especially as my team’s assets proliferated. Occasionally, there is a resource affecting an outage but no one remembers where it is. I am constantly frustrated by existing tooling. APIs can work, after you’ve navigated the byzantine documentation, but I often find myself doing ad-hoc tasks which are best…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. We're building a search engine for GCP launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1IW

    Hi HN! During the last few years, I worked on a few applications built with Go, running on AWS Lambda. As I got to know the platform better, I started to find Go & Lambda to be a really productive combination. The applications were fast, and they ended up being much cheaper to run than what my team & I had built before. It’s probably not the best platform for _every_ application, but I was surprised at how much of our workload worked well on it. As we brought new engineers on to our team and helped them get up to speed with the stack, I found that we were covering a lot of the same topics…

    2021 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    An Alfred workflow that lets you instantly open Google Cloud services or search GCP resources—fast, simple, and right from your Alfred.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3HO

    Hello HN, I’m excited to share something we’ve been working on: Cloud Troubleshooting Labs. This tool provides on-demand environments for engineers to practice hands-on troubleshooting with AWS, GCP, Azure, and Kubernetes. What it does: We use Pulumi to spin up these environments. Each scenario includes a diagram and an explanation of the available IT infrastructure. Engineers are tasked with fixing configuration issues to make the application work. Depending on the test type, the environment could range from a simple terminal to a full cloud environment or a web-based VSCode. Many of our…

    2024 · brokee.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Find the optimal Google Compute Engine (GCE) machine type

    2022 · gcloud-compute.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I've been a big fan of fly.io with it’s devx, but cold starts and pricing have been a consistent problem. Even for side projects it's painful if they take 30s to load, it just kills the whole experience. With coding agents becoming good, there were a lot more things I started building, and I just wanted to run all of those things! GCI was built to solve this. It’s just a CLI, just uses ssh to interact with your target machine, and relies on docker swarm to get your services running (docker swarm is IMO underrated, providing benefits even with a single node). It can deploy on any machine that…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6WB

    Hey HN: Kaveh here, founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS, GCP, and Azure spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. I have been building Usage AI for almost 4 years now (4 year anniversary in 1 month from now!) with an incredible group of founding people. We started as a product just to help lower AWS EC2 costs, and now we do all major AWS services (such as RDS, OpenSearch, ElastiCache, and Redshift with more on the way) and other…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    wsgrok▲7

    I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.

    Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    ClickOps empowers businesses to deploy secure, scalable

    2025 · simplecloud.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey HN, I'm so excited to finally share with you what I've been working on recently. One month ago I asked my audience what they wanted to learn about Websites, APIs and Servers security [0]. From the feedback, I've identified a few recurring pain points that I've started to address (and many more) in this new book. From theory to practice, you will learn how low-level network and security protocols work. How to configure Cloudflare to secure and scale your web applications. How to create serverless applications and which database to chose with serverless functions. How to optimize your…

    2023 · kerkour.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Fix Inventory helps you identify and remove the most critical risks in AWS, GCP, Azure and Kubernetes. - someengineering/fixinventory

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

    2024 · twitter.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12AB

    Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched a new free tool to help engineers understand their AWS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up end up becoming cloud accountants or end up forking over a big % of their AWS bill for a tool to understand costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how this new tool works: It's fully self-serve and…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  13. 13WB

    We’ve been building a Cloud-Managed Hypervisor that makes running applications on your own servers as effortless as the public cloud. Over my career I’ve watched the transition from on-prem to public cloud. The cloud paradigm shift is as much about empowering engineers as it is about elastic infrastructure, but the tooling for on-prem and private clouds is at best heavyweight and at worst stuck in the last century. We've tackled some interesting problems in the process of building this, such as providing a cloud-style metadata service from our platform. We’d love for you to read our story…

    2023 · gallium.cloud · its alternatives →

  14. 14CW

    Hello HN, Lucas here. I’ve been working with BigQuery for ~5 years, mostly in large (petabyte-scale) environments. Over time we ended up spending a lot of money and engineering effort just trying to understand where costs were coming from, why and how to optimize them. At some point we decided to stop, leverage all our past experience and spend a full cycle building tooling focused on cost visibility and optimization. The main goal was to regain ownership of cost data and make it possible to understand our cost structure in under a minute, while aligning the views of engineering and FinOps…

    Jan 2026 · cloudclerk.ai · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    I'd like to share a project I've been working on for the past few months. It's a distributed workflow engine written entirely in Go. Some highlights: * Tasks are executed in a Docker container * Can run stand-alone or distributed * Highly extensible * Able to enforce limits (CPU/RAM) per task * Web UI Would love the get your feedback on it, and find out if this could be useful.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Pick the right GCP compute, database & IAM — free, no signup

    Jul 2026 · alekseialeinikov.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17TC

    the cloud is a walled garden built for profit [ not efficiency ]. you’re paying for idle, autoscaling is too slow, and serverless is a scam. locked in, overcharged, and out of options. lttle.cloud is different. decentralized, open-source, and built for real performance [ sub-10ms cold start ], true pay-for-what-you-use pricing, and zero vendor lock-in. deploy anything as "serverless" from any docker image, no rewrites, no bullshit. powered by the blockchain and built in public, it’s transparent, efficient, and free from vendor lock-in. run your own private cloud or join the decentralized…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Host, track, and manage changes to large codebases on GCP

    2018 · source.cloud.google.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Last week I wrote about building a scanner that writes its own exploits. A cron job runs Claude Code every night, it reads new CVEs, writes proof-of-concept checks, tests them against vulnerable and patched Docker instances, and opens PRs. I review and merge in the morning. That post was about how t

    Feb 2026 · attackerview.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Back in April I left the Agents team at Cloudflare because even though I loved the work, I always had the drive to build the apps rather than the libraries. I felt like nobody was building the ideas that I wanted to exist. My biggest drive was wanting my agents to run fully on “the cloud” yet having them on all my machines at the same time. So I ended up building GSV, fully open source. GSV acts as a cloud computer by having a remote file system and a shell environment and trying very hard to pretend to be something close to Unix. There’s a kernel that handles all the primitive operations,…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I finally got fed up with making work + personal Git repos work on my machine. Ever clone a work repository and accidentally make commits using your personal email? Or forget how to make your work repos use your work SSH key? Yeah... same. So I built the tool I've always wanted. GitPersona - a CLI tool for managing many git profiles on a single machine. Shoutout to my boy Codex for helping me finally ship this.

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22SA

    Hi HN, I built SubTrack to help teams find unused SaaS tools and cloud resources before they silently eat into budgets. The motivation came from seeing how hard it is to answer simple questions: – Which SaaS tools are actually used? – Which cloud resources are idle? – What will our end-of-month spend look like? SubTrack connects to tools like AWS, GitHub, Vercel, and others to surface unused resources and cost signals from one place. Recently I added multi-account support, currency localization, and optional AI-based insights to help interpret usage patterns. This is an early-stage project…

    Jan 2026 · subtrack.pulseguard.in · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hey everyone, we just released a new version of our Infrastructure as Code Python SDK that now runs entirely on your machine - no account required. LaunchFlow extends OpenTofu to provide features like multi-environment support [1], autoconfigured infrastructure clients [2], and API release management [3]. Our goal is to provide a Python-native infrastructure toolkit that handles everything from automating your infrastructure to using it in your application code. You can use our library of preconfigured OpenTofu modules to add GCP / AWS infrastructure to your app with just a few lines of…

    2024 · launchflow.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    i had previously posted this when it was aws-rce. it’s changed enough that i want to post it again.

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

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