use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / hero

PIPE · CROSS-CLOUD MIGRATION

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

A 200GB Postgres backup in Frankfurt. A fresh box in Singapore. You skip the S3 round-trip. One curl pipes pg_dump to a Hoody pipe URL; one curl on the other side streams it straight into psql. Bytes are in flight, never at rest.

Read the pipe docs

src.frankfurt:~

SOURCE · LIVE

eu-fra-1 · Frankfurt

# stream the dump out$ pg_dump db | gzip \ | curl -T - https://pipe.../migration[INFO] Streaming to 1 receiver(s)...

pipe/migration

0 bytes stored

dst.singapore:~

DEST · READY

ap-sin-1 · Singapore

# pipe straight into psql$ curl https://pipe.../migration \ | gunzip | psql newdb[INFO] Transfer complete.

200GB · zero hops · zero hold

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / mechanism

It's not a bucket. It's a router.

Hoody Pipe is a named path on an HTTP server. The sender PUTs a stream to it, the receiver GETs the same path, and the server splices the two together. Nothing is written to disk; the pipe holds zero bytes by design.

Bytes between two curls5-MIN TTL · NO STORAGE LAYER

01 · SENDER

PUT to the path

From the source box, pg_dump | gzip | curl -T - to the pipe URL. The PUT body streams as fast as TCP backpressure allows. The server holds the connection until a receiver shows up on the same path.

PUT /api/v1/pipe/migration

02 · ROUTER

Splice in memory

When the receiver's GET lands on the same path, Hoody splices the upload's bytes directly into the download's response. No buffer, no on-disk staging, no async commit — just a direct stream between two HTTP sockets.

0 bytes on disk

03 · RECEIVER

GET it as a stream

From the destination box, curl GETs the path and pipes the response through gunzip | psql. The receiver-side stream finishes the second the sender's last byte lands. No retry, no manifest, no cleanup.

GET /api/v1/pipe/migration

Connection ordering doesn't matter — the receiver can curl first and block until the sender connects (or vice-versa), up to the 5-minute pipe TTL. Backpressure flows end-to-end: a slow psql throttles the curl on the source. There's no queue to overflow because there's no queue.

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / commands

The actual two commands

These are not pseudocode. Open two terminals on the two servers, run one each, and watch a 200GB backup leave one cloud and land in another.

frankfurt:~ · sender

PUT · SENDERFrankfurt → pipe

# 1. Stream the live database to the pipe$pg_dump --format=custom mydb | gzip \ | curl -T - https://pipe.containers.hoody.com/api/v1/pipe/migration# 2. The server replies with status messages[INFO] Waiting for 1 receiver(s) to connect...[INFO] Streaming to 1 receiver(s)...[INFO] Upload complete.[INFO] Transfer complete.

singapore:~ · receiver

GET · RECEIVERpipe → Singapore

# 1. Pipe straight into the new database$curl https://pipe.containers.hoody.com/api/v1/pipe/migration \ | gunzip | psql newdb# 2. Bytes hit psql as they leave FrankfurtCREATE TABLE okCOPY 4823918 okALTER TABLE ok

PUT (curl -T) is preferred because it's how curl wants to upload a stream. POST works identically — same path, same status messages. Use ?n=N on both sides if you need to fan out the same dump to many receivers.

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / spectator

PROGRESS · ?progress

A spectator URL anyone can watch

A third laptop opens the same pipe URL with ?progress and gets a real-time SSE feed of bytes-per-second, ETA, and connected receivers. Spectating doesn't consume a receiver slot — fifty teammates can watch the migration without changing the n value or interfering with the transfer.

NO RECEIVER SLOT
UP TO 50 SPECTATORS
30-MIN LINGER

spectator.…hoody.com/migration?progress

SSE · text/event-streamSTREAMING

event: statedata: ["state":"streaming","receivers":1]event: progressdata: ["bytes":83_421_667_840, "speed":"412 MB/s", "eta":"4m 44s"]event: progressdata: ["bytes":118_295_117_824, "speed":"406 MB/s", "eta":"3m 21s"]↻ live · 250ms throttle

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / why

Why two curls beats six steps

The S3 round-trip looks simple on a whiteboard. In production it's a stack of moving parts that all charge by the second. The pipe collapses the entire stack into the transport itself.

No third storage layer

S3, GCS, Azure Blob — the round-trip exists only because there was no other place to park the bytes. The pipe is the path. There is no bucket to provision, lifecycle-rule, or scrub afterwards.

Pay for flight, not for rest

Egress on the upload, egress on the download — twice. With the pipe the bytes leave Frankfurt and arrive in Singapore in one hop. You're paying for the seconds the connection was open, not for storage you'll delete tomorrow.

HTTP all the way down

Your monitoring already understands HTTP. So does your VPN, your firewall, your audit log. No new IAM identity, no new SDK, no new failure mode — it's a curl command.

DIMENSIONS3 ROUND-TRIPHOODY PIPE

Steps6 stages2 curls
Disk used200 GB0 bytes
Egress legs2 × 200 GB1 × 200 GB
Cleanuplifecycle rulenone

Speed is bounded by the slower link end-to-end (Frankfurt egress, Singapore ingress, your TCP window). Hoody's pipe holds zero bytes — there is no server-side storage; backpressure flows directly between the two endpoints.

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / punchline

Two terminals, one URL, no third storage layer.

The whole migration is the same shape as cat file | wc -l. The fact that the two pipes happen to live in different data centres is an implementation detail of the URL.

zero hops
zero hold
one URL

Read the API

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / replaces

What this replaces

Anything that exists only because nobody had an HTTP path that streams. The pipe collapses the entire data-migration stack into one curl on each side.

AWS S3 cross-region copyTwo egresses, one bucket, lifecycle rules
Dropbox transfer200 GB sits on someone else's disk for a week
Google Drive hand-offQuota walls, share links, manual cleanup
rsync over SSHSSH between random clouds = bastions and key swaps
SCP + resumeOne process, no fan-out, breaks on flaky links
Third-party data-migration toolsWhole vendor for a curl with extra steps

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / cta

Skip the bucket. The transport is the URL.

Read the pipe API

use-cases / move-200gb-between-clouds-with-two-curls / related

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

One bare-metal box runs dozens to hundreds of Hoody containers. KSM and BTRFS dedup make the marginal cost near zero.

Containers·Snapshots

Onboard a developer with one link

A new engineer joins on Monday. You send one URL. They open it on whatever laptop they have and they're in a fresh container cloned from your developer-baseline snapshot — code, deps, env, seed data, VSCode-in-browser. Writing code in five minutes, not setting up.

Snapshots·Containers·Terminal·Files

API endpoints that materialize on demand

A wildcard exec script catches the call, asks an LLM to write the handler, runs it in a V8 sandbox, and saves the route. The next call is native.

Exec·Agent·Code·Files

Branch computers like Git

Snapshot a running container — files, processes, memory. Restore in seconds. Fork via /copy. Branching, but for the entire machine.

Snapshots·Containers

Real VS Code on your phone

The Code Orchestrator spawns a VS Code instance on the container and serves the editor over a normal HTTPS URL. Any device with a browser can open it. The work lives in the container, not on the device.

Display·Terminal·Files·Containers+1

AI agents that spawn other AI agents

A research agent posts to /api/v1/projects/$PID/containers to start a child container, then calls the child's agent URL like any other HTTP service. Sub-agents spawn their own sub-agents the same way. No orchestrator framework, just URLs.

Agent·Exec·Containers

One sandbox per customer, automatically

An exec script catches your signup webhook, copies a fresh-customer container, and hands the new tenant their own URL. Isolation is the operating system, not a tenant_id column.

Containers·Snapshots·Exec·Files

Wake up to a finished prototype

Hand the agent a paragraph at midnight. It spawns its own containers, snapshots before risky steps, and posts to your notification webhook at sunrise.

Agent·Snapshots·Containers·Browser+2

Emergency production fix from your phone

PagerDuty wakes you. Open the terminal URL on your phone. PATCH the snapshot from before the bad deploy. Production is back. No bastion, no VPN, no laptop.

Terminal·Snapshots·Network

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

One pipe URL. Up to 256 readers. Three engineers tail the same incident at once with no bastion, no Datadog seat, no log forwarder.

Pipe

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

The build container streams the tarball to a pipe path with ?n=30. All thirty test workers curl the same URL. Bytes go through once, fanned out.

Pipe

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Your agent runs at home. You're at a café. Pipe each event of the loop through Hoody Pipe and curl the same path from your phone — the trace lands character by character. No SSH, no dashboard, no upload.

Pipe·Agent

Send a teammate a database state in one line

pg_dump streams straight into their psql. No file uploaded, no link shared, no download. The pipe routes the bytes through.

Pipe

Stream LLM tokens to anything that reads HTTP

Step 3 streams tokens with curl -T -. Step 4 curls the same path. Tokens move generator to consumer at line speed. No SSE plumbing, no broker.

Pipe·Agent

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

Append ?progress to the pipe URL. Anyone who opens it gets a live HTML dashboard — bytes, speed, ETA, state. Up to fifty spectators, none consuming a receiver slot, none touching the stream.

Pipe

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

Stripe POSTs to a pipe path with ?n=12. Twelve subscribers curl the receiver URL with ?n=12. The pipe holds the event until everyone is connected.

Pipe·Exec

A CI cache that's just two curl commands

tar | zstd | curl puts node_modules into a pipe. Twenty downstream jobs curl | zstd -d | tar x. No S3 bucket, no cache action, no egress bill.

Pipe·Containers

Drag-drop uploads into your script

hoody-pipe serves a web upload form at every path. Drag a file onto the page, your script reads the bytes from stdin. Zero upload code, no S3 bucket, no presigned URLs.

Pipe·Exec

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

ffmpeg streams your screen to a pipe path with ?n=200. Each attendee curls the URL into a browser tab. No platform, no logins, no upload.

Pipe

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Container A writes to a pipe path. Container B reads from the same path. Backpressure is the connection. No Redis, no queue, no broker.

Pipe·Containers

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

The agent streams its trace to a pipe path you can curl from your phone. When it finishes, its last act hits hoody-notifications and your phone buzzes. Two URLs and a buzz — no SDK, no client app, no dashboard.

Pipe·Agent·Notifications

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

ffmpeg captures the mic, pipes to a URL. The other end curls and plays the audio. No Zoom, no SDK, no signaling server.

Pipe

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

A panel of five models reviews the same input. Each runs in its own container and streams its verdict to its own pipe path. A judge process curls all five in parallel and tallies the result.

Pipe·Agent·Containers

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

Snapshot the incident-time logs in hoody-files. Replay them through a Hoody Pipe URL with ?n=8. Eight engineers curl the same path and watch the cascade fire in lockstep — the post-mortem is a synchronized stream, not a Confluence doc.

Pipe·Files

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

A teammate pings for a 4 GB dump. Slack rejects it, Drive needs a share request. You type curl -T file …; they type curl … > file. The bytes move directly between disks — no upload bar, no link to share.

Pipe

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

One GPU runs llama.cpp. Its tokens stream into a pipe path with ?n=50. Fifty containers curl the same URL and split the stream.

Pipe·Daemon

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

Each container's monitoring loop curls a metric to a pipe URL. The dashboard curls the same URL with ?progress and renders the SSE stream.

Pipe

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

POST a managed cron entry with expires_at set 48 hours out. The job runs on schedule, then removes itself — no reminder, no cleanup PR, no stale entry.

Cron

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A hoody-cron entry that fires at 02:55 UTC, curls the snapshots URL, and names the artifact pre-migration-2026-05-04. Five minutes later the migration runs. If it succeeds, the snapshot sits idle and costs nothing. If it fails, you restore in 30 seconds with a single PATCH.

Cron·Snapshots

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Each tenant gets their own container and their own hoody-cron service. Customer A's 9am digest fires on time even when customer B's job hangs for 40 minutes, because they aren't on the same crontab.

Cron·Containers

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

A nightly cron POSTs a spawn request, the agent does its hour of work, then a second cron tears the container down. The agent exists only when there is work for it to do.

Cron·Agent·Containers

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

Raw events pile up in a sqlite URL. Every night a cron entry curls an exec endpoint, the script runs the rollup SQL, writes the daily table back. No DAG, no Airflow Postgres, no scheduler dashboard.

Cron·SQLite·Exec

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

Your repo checks in `.hoody/crontab`. The deploy script PUTs that file to the new container's Cron API. Each branch gets its container, its filesystem, its schedule.

Cron·Containers

On-call escalation that ages out with the shift

POST a cron entry with expires_at = shift end. When the shift ends, the entry deletes itself. The next on-call posts their own.

Cron·Notifications

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Three lines in one crontab: hourly browser scrape into SQLite, daily exec digest, weekly archive to files. Flat-rate server, three rhythms, no scheduler service.

Cron·Browser·SQLite·Files

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Customers POST their own 5-field expressions; their crontab lives in their container, isolated. You don't validate against a global queue.

Cron·Containers

Schedule the agent, not the script

A 5-field cron entry curls hoody-agent with a prompt instead of running a fixed script. Today is the last day of the month — the agent figures it out. The data shape changed — the agent figures it out.

Cron·Agent

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Each cron run POSTs a heartbeat to a notifications endpoint. A second cron checks last-heartbeat and pages on silence. Silence is the alert.

Cron·Notifications

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

An hourly cron POSTs a snapshot named with the hour. After 24 hours each new snapshot overwrites yesterday's at the same hour. The 24-floor time machine.

Cron·Snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

You captured 30 minutes of real Stripe traffic into a hoody-files folder. One cron entry replays it against staging at 9am every weekday — same volume, same payloads, same time-of-day pressure.

Cron·Files·Exec

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

Open the cron URL on your phone in the gate area. Tap a row, change a single field of the cron expression, hit Save. PATCH lands. The job fires tonight on the new schedule. No SSH session, no jump box, no laptop.

Cron·Terminal

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Cron at 9am POSTs to an exec script that builds the digest and curls a pipe URL with ?n=200. Two hundred recipients hit the same URL once.

Cron·Exec·Pipe

Mute the flaky job without losing it

PATCH /entries/[id] [ enabled: false ]. The job stays in your crontab waiting to be fixed. No deletion, no rewrite, no lost context.

Cron

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

A nightly cron POSTs to the supervisor agent with yesterday's agent traces from SQLite. The supervisor scores each one. Cron is the supervisor.

Cron·Agent·SQLite

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

The cleanup script checks if there's anything left to clean. When the directory is empty, it DELETEs its own cron entry. Job's done, job's gone.

Cron·Files

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

Cron weekly: POST to an exec script that runs certbot, posts the new cert to the proxy via PATCH. No shell session, no key, no jump host.

Cron·Exec

A weekly canary that tries to break production

Sunday 7am cron wakes a Hoody Agent in a fresh container against a snapshot of prod. It runs the OWASP top twenty, fuzzes the API, and writes a findings report to a URL by 9am. Container retires.

Cron·Agent·Browser·Snapshots

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

Eleven half-finished side projects on Heroku is eleven dynos at $5–7 each. On Hoody it's eleven containers on one $29 bare-metal box. Idle costs zero, the URL wakes the container in milliseconds, and the chess engine nobody uses still runs.

Containers

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Each open PR gets its own clone of a snapshot. The container wakes when reviewers click the link; idle PRs cost nothing.

Containers·Snapshots

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Twelve isolated containers, each its own SaaS, share one $49 bare-metal server — a step above the $29 entry tier, chosen here for the RAM headroom fifty containers want. Per-product margins go from negative to nice.

Containers

Kill the staging-server tax

Stop paying for a duplicate of production. Snapshot the prod container, branch staging from it on demand, freeze it back to disk when nobody's testing. Three environments, one machine, one bill.

Containers·Snapshots

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

Each client site lives in its own container; you bill them per-site, you pay the host once. The math finally works for agencies.

Containers·Workspaces

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

Your agents stop renting compute by the second from E2B/Modal/Daytona. They use containers on the box you already have.

Containers·Agent·Exec

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Staging used to die because it was expensive to keep around. When idle is free, staging gets to live — even the one a teammate touched 90 days ago.

Containers·Snapshots

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

Eight hundred isolated customers on three bare-metal servers — one flat-rate monthly bill, no per-tenant meter. Each tenant gets a real container with its own kernel namespace, filesystem, and URL. Idle containers cost nothing on top of the server you already pay for.

Containers·Snapshots·Exec

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Cache files live in /files on the box you already rent. Workers PUT and GET tarballs over HTTP. No S3 bucket, no egress, no third vendor — the bytes never leave the box.

Files·Containers

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls

Each prospect gets a real, isolated copy of your product seeded with their data. Cloned from a snapshot. Theirs to keep for a week.

Containers·Snapshots

Move 200GB between clouds with two curls

It's not a bucket. It's a router.

PUT to the path

Splice in memory

GET it as a stream

The actual two commands

A spectator URL anyone can watch

Why two curls beats six steps

No third storage layer

Pay for flight, not for rest

HTTP all the way down

What this replaces

Read the others

Sixty containers on one server

Onboard a developer with one link

API endpoints that materialize on demand

Branch computers like Git

Real VS Code on your phone

AI agents that spawn other AI agents

One sandbox per customer, automatically

Wake up to a finished prototype

Emergency production fix from your phone

Tail production logs to a URL anyone can curl

Push one build to thirty CI workers at once

Watch your agent think from the coffee shop

Share your screen with a URL, not a meeting invite

Send a teammate a database state in one line

Stream LLM tokens to anything that reads HTTP

A progress bar your boss can spectate without joining

The webhook fan-out you didn't have to build

A CI cache that's just two curl commands

Drag-drop uploads into your script

Broadcast a workshop to 200 viewers from your laptop

Inter-container IPC without the message broker

Tail your agent on the train, get pinged when it lands

A microphone over HTTP, in two terminals

Five agents, five pipes, one verdict

Replay this morning's incident to the whole team

The fastest 'send me that file' you've ever typed

Run a local LLM, serve it to your whole fleet

A live metrics dashboard with no metrics backend

The cron job that deletes itself when you're done

Snapshot the container right before the nightly migration

A separate crontab for every customer, automatically

Wake an agent at 3am, retire it at 4

Daily rollups without an orchestrator

A crontab per branch, deployed with the code

On-call escalation that ages out with the shift

Hourly scrape, daily digest, weekly archive — one container

Let your customers BYO their own cron schedule

Schedule the agent, not the script

A heartbeat for the silent jobs

Keep the last 24 hours as 24 snapshots

Replay this morning's webhooks at the same time tomorrow

Edit your crontab from a phone, in the airport

A scheduled digest that fans out to 200 inboxes

Mute the flaky job without losing it

An agent that grades yesterday's agents

Cleanup jobs that schedule their own retirement

Roll your TLS certificates without an SSH session

A weekly canary that tries to break production

The hobby-project graveyard you can afford to keep alive

A preview environment per pull request, all month

Run a 12-product portfolio from one bare-metal box

Kill the staging-server tax

Forty client sites, one rent, one dashboard

Replace the E2B bill with the bare metal you already rent

Idle staging costs nothing, so staging stops getting deleted

Per-customer sandboxes at fleet scale

The CI cache that's not an S3 line item

Fifty demo environments for fifty sales calls