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Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

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Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#3
post #2

Initially, I tried doing this with a 2010 Mac Mini (which claims to support VMX), but couldn't get Minikube running on it... For the past two weeks though, I haven't had any issues with this setup on the Macbook Air!

You could try k3s in the mini. k3s uses a less resource hungry setup, parity is not there yes as many resource definitions won't work out of the box.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#4
post #3
post #2

Initially, I tried doing this with a 2010 Mac Mini (which claims to support VMX), but couldn't get Minikube running on it... For the past two weeks though, I haven't had any issues with this setup on the Macbook Air!

You could try k3s in the mini. k3s uses a less resource hungry setup, parity is not there yes as many resource definitions won't work out of the box.

Interesting, maybe I'll give that a try! (would be nice since I have 16GB of RAM on the Mini vs 4GB on the MBA and it is better suited to leaving on all the time)

When I tried with minikube, the VirtualBox VM would boot successfully, but there was an issue with the networking b/w the VM and MacOS

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#5
post #2

Initially, I tried doing this with a 2010 Mac Mini (which claims to support VMX), but couldn't get Minikube running on it... For the past two weeks though, I haven't had any issues with this setup on the Macbook Air!

> which claims to support VMX

I though Kubernetes was all about containers, not VMs?

Why not just boot proper Linux on that thing?

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#6
I wonder what it would take to do something like this with kind[0] so you can have something resembling an actual multi-node cluster, if it's even possible.

I've used kind successfully on WSL for experimenting locally, and even found a script to open up ports on the firewall and set up a port "forwarding" of sorts using the netsh utility, which let me access a program bound to a port within WSL. Though I suspect additional hurdles considering however the networking for kind works.

[0] https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#7
If you want to use your own domain you can turn Cloudflare into a DDNS by frequently checking your public-IP for changes and update the records on Cloudflare using their API if it change (this is free, except the domain cost): https://github.com/punnerud/cloudflare-ddns

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#8
What sort of fun projects/experiments do people do with a super low powered k8s cluster locally?

I'm kind of in this weird position where I understand the benefits and use of k8s, but I:

a) Can't think of any cutesy distributed systems/microservices type thing that I could or would want to run on a low power machine locally (lack of processing power or ISP getting pissed off @ massive amount of traffic if you're e.g. scraping a ton of data and doing stream processing on it in your little cluster)

b) Don't really understand the point in investing time in it, as it feels like one of those things you learn on the job as it comes up. And for a lot of people (the majority, probably?) it'll probably never even come up unless they just are hunting for new tech to introduce at work regardless of if the business actually needs it. Which IMO, most businesses don't even have a compelling reason to switch from the old 3 tier monolith architecture.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#10
post #8

What sort of fun projects/experiments do people do with a super low powered k8s cluster locally? I'm kind of in this weird position where I understand the benefits and use of k8s, but I: a) Can't think of any cutesy distributed systems/microservices type thing that I could or would want to run on a low power machine locally (lack of processing power or ISP getting pissed off @ massive amount of traffic if you're e.g.…

One benefit is to learn how to admin a Kubernetes cluster.

Kubernetes knowledge is becoming an important job skill, and if your current employer does not use Kubernetes, you'll need to learn it on your own.

> Which IMO, most businesses don't even have a compelling reason to switch from the old 3 tier monolith architecture.

Compelling reasons include self-healing, autoscaling, and official support from all major cloud providers. In my experience, it's actually easier to adopt Kubernetes at a smaller company than a larger one.

It's also becoming harder to hire developers who are willing to work on monolithic codebases. It's been a while since those were the state of the art, and a lot of people with 5+ years in the industry have never seen them before.

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