Or how to elegantly waste a perfectly fine piece of hardware in a neatly over-engineered way ;)
Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
21–30 of 126 posts
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which claims to support VMX I though Kubernetes was all about containers, not VMs? Why not just boot proper Linux on that thing?
Your Kubernetes node itself is Linux, so requires virtualization if your host machine is not Linux. Docker for Mac also works this way; when you run a container, it's running on a Linux VM that Docker sets up, not on your Mac directly. Even on Linux, minikube uses a separate VM. It's just cleaner than having the kubelet running on your workstation directly. (microk8s takes a different approach and runs on your machin…
> Your Kubernetes node itself is Linux, so requires virtualization if your host machine is not Linux.
Thus my question: If the aim is to use the machine for a Kubernetes "cluster", why not boot proper Linux on it, so Kubernetes can run at full speed, without any VM overhead?
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#23You could sell the MacBook and build a decent raspberrypi cluster with the money you make on it.
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#24What 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.…
I use mine to run the CI/CD for my projects. I used minikube to setup a qemu-based k8s cluster.
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#25You could sell the MacBook and build a decent raspberrypi cluster with the money you make on it.
Only a clam seller would come up with that ;-)
I like it! ^^
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#26What 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…
This sounds a lot like CV-driven development, rather than any actual use cases. That's not to say it's a bad idea for an individual dev, but might not say great things about our industry.
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely no more bugs than its contemporaries. But MacOS does handle low memory conditions much better than Windows does. MacOS (on apple hardware) does have the benefit of optimised fan curves and undervolted CPU profiles which would be hard to replicate in Linux though.
Well, I used the word convenience for a reason. I have a MBP running Linux as a server, and it was fiddly to set up correctly. I didn't mind too much, but on macOS you've got none of that. Catering for edge cases like; when closing lid, it should not go to sleep, with external drive connected and mounted, it won't boot if that somehow disappears, Apple remote cannot easily be disabled (there's one used in the room, a…
with external drive connected and mounted, it won't boot if that somehow disappears
Couple ideas, for what little they may be worth. Grub might be installed on the wrong drive. Or, if you’re getting past grub, look up systemd’s nofail option for /etc/fstab.
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This sounds a lot like CV-driven development, rather than any actual use cases. That's not to say it's a bad idea for an individual dev, but might not say great things about our industry.
We have adopted Kubernetes at our startup. It's solved a couple of problems but created a whole lot more. We aren't at the stage that we need the scaling yet.
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#29You could sell the MacBook and build a decent raspberrypi cluster with the money you make on it.
A big problem is local storage provisioner for kubernetes is still not GA. I want to use an SSD attached to one master, and use that as storage for the other RPIs. Doing this is still undocumented/the Wild West.
Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster
#30What 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.…
I've been running K8s since it's first stable released. It worked wonderfully for a 30 micro-service stack of node.js and Scala applications for a financial services company. I would never want to manage that many services in ec2 or ecs instances.
I also baked a 25+service AI platform onto 4 virtual machines, running kubernetes, for deployment in an air-gapped system without a knowladgable operator. It was an excellent choice for that project because of the auto-healing capabilities.
I have also run it at a small startup where we had a combination of static nginx sites, ruby on rails sites, elixer sights, node.js app, and even a c++ app. (it was at a crypto company if you are wondering why so many disparate languages). Having a single deploy pipeline for 5+ different languages and architectures was awesome. I would have killed myself if I needed to support all of those in their native environments at the same time.
There are lots of good use cases for k8s, and honestly it's not that hard if you already have system admin skills because you understand the problems it solves and how it works. Most of the folks I have seen struggle with it are developers (and likewise, I struggle with OOP sometimes - i don't mean to diminish developers skills).