Amsterdam, Netherlands is finally live on Kyun!!

 

I can’t believe it either. Jokes aside, Amsterdam is here, and, God willing, it will become our new flagship European location.

 

We expect fewer uptime issues and better stability on the network side compared to Romania. We did start off day 1 on the wrong foot, with a 3 hour downtime plummeting the uptime to like 90%, but that will correct itself with time. It was a strange misconfiguration issue related to the new network architecture that we’re using for all new locations going forward, and it should not happen again.

 

Bricks are currently not available in Amsterdam, but they are definitely coming. Not telling you to do anything, but “how soon” depends on your amount of shilling and support. Just saying.

Addressing Feedback

 

We’ve gotten feedback, some in private, some as 1 star reviews, some valid, some not, and we are actively working on improving the weak points of Kyun. Because #KyunCares.

 

The review bombing I mentioned in the last post did not stop. It had actually became so bad that pluja, owner of kycnot.me, had to step in and add a special flag to the Kyun listing that requires proof of being a valid customer in order to post a review. Still, some of the feedback coming from the spammer(s?) was actually valid, and we’re not ignoring it just because he’s annoying and obsessed.

Brick Instability

 

I agree that Bricks have not been as stable as I hoped they would be after the Mesa update, but I’ve been watching error logs like a hawk, and, with the added help of customers reporting issues, stability has improved a lot since.

 

Starting a Danbo with an unreachable Brick now correctly reports the issue (instead of “something went wrong”), detaches the affected Brick, informs you of this detach, and starts the VM anyways.

 

There is now also a status indicator inside each attached Brick in the Danbo panel, so you actually know what’s going on:

 

    green: connection is good, Brick is healthy

    yellow: cache-only/recovering from cache-only, connection to the Brick is severed but the hypervisor is doing best-effort write cache until it comes back, or is currently flushing the local cache to the remote Brick

    red: connection to the Brick is completely dead, no local cache

 

Bad Uptime

 

I assume that when people say Kyun has bad uptime, they are mostly referring to Bucharest. On that front, there is absolutely nothing we can do besides offering alternatives, which we have (and will continue to do so, with more European locations coming in the future). With time, Bucharest will probably be phased out, and we will not be adding any new nodes. Existing services in Bucharest will remain in Bucharest.

 

If, by bad uptime, you are referring to the Mesa migration downtime, that is fair, and I’ve explained it in the previous post. It was not intentional, it was simply a matter of not testing the networking enough in a production-like environment, and I have corrected that. Kyun, today, has production network simulation in staging and dev environments, and the testing framework will continue to be improved upon.

 

I’ve also added more monitoring and canary node software deployments, so a bad update gets rolled back quickly as soon as something smells off instead of being deployed across the fleet.

 

Kyun will never have enterprise-level uptime, because that is not what Kyun is, but I admit we can do better.

Kyun is Expensive

 

We hear you. We did increase prices for new services when demand was extremely high, but, after receiving feedback, we’ve decreased them.

 

There is also a 30% off first month sale going on right now, with many future sales coming.

Kyun is Unprofessional

 

If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Kyun has SOUL.

 

To clarify: if you treat me and the support staff with respect, we will treat you the same. We’re not assholes, we’re not here to make fun of anyone, we’re here to provide a good service. But we’re also not your slaves. If you’re being unreasonable, we will be just as unreasonable.

 

We don’t bend over backwards for anyone. That is what Kyun is about. That is what Kyun has been about since day 1.

“Kyun UI is pretty, but turns my laptop into an air fryer”

 

I admit the Kyun UI is pretty heavy, especially on some setups with performance-eating privacy measures (Tor Browser, VMs without GPU acceleration), and the performance difference between Chromium and not-Chromium is pretty noticeable even on my machine.

 

I’ve integrated performance profiling across 3 browser engines (Chromium, WebKit, Firefox) into our E2E testing suite. Optimizations are coming, and they will continue until morale improves.