Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

devopsdirective.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 126 posts

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

#31

Post by tsm212 »

akiselev wrote: post #18
monadic2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why run windows at all?

Dual booting/VMs might not be practical or worth the effort if you're a gamer or work in one of these fields: mechanical/electrical engineering, firmware, lab or factory automation, architecture, etc.

I guess the only limiting factor in dual booting would be a lack of skill to set up dual boot. It's quite intimidating at first. I have been dual-booting for ~8 years and I have had my fair share of blunders but nowadays setting up a dual boot pc is very easy especially for the tech savvy (people who are running a k8 cluster) people. I cannot even recall if there was any time where I could restore atleast windows part of the os.

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

#32

Post by captn3m0 »

I used to run minikube on my MBA till last year (Was running Arch). It was very underpowered to run a cluster, as I guess they'll soon find out. This was a MBA 2015, so the OP's 2012 MBA is even less powerful.

The fans would start whirring, and the device was immediately unusable for anything else. I switched to using microk8s, which is slightly better, but still makes the device crawls. The MBA also only has 4GB RAM, which is very low on what you might count as k8s-ready.

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

#34

Post by mosselman »

rmdashrfstar wrote: post #29
mosselman wrote: post #23

You 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.

I am not a kubernetes expert so I have no idea. Sounds like a fun challenge. I remember seeing something about network mounts for linux in general. Maybe go around kubernetes? If you solve it I'd be interested in how you did it, so an update would be greatly appreciated.

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

#35

Post by mosselman »

mettamage wrote: post #25
mosselman wrote: post #23

You 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! ^^

It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit to get what you mean ;)

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

#36

Post by sgt »

Scramblejams wrote: post #27
sgt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember what it was now, I had mounted in fstab, but using the device path (e.g. /dev/sdb1) instead of the UUID of the disk. The device path seems to occasionally change (which is bizarre as it is the only device connected). Using a UUID does the trick. But it was just an example of many minor details that needed to be fiddled with in order to create a 24/7 laptop server. I don't mind - it's part of the fun I guess, but I'm just waiting for the next edge case.

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

#37

Post by rumanator »

ForHackernews wrote: post #26
twblalock wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

> This sounds a lot like CV-driven development, rather than any actual use cases.

There are plenty of companies ou there that have old COTS lying around and require some sort of IT infrastructure. Being able to setup and manage a working cluster of COTS hardware is a great way to add computational resources to a company without spending au additional cash or having to rubber stamp permits.

I personally have done this in a previous job, and a small POC with minikube turned into a 3-node kubeadm cluster that deployed and managed two company-wide intranet services like a breeze. Zero cash was spent, the only resource used was a few hours of my time, everyone benefitted, and managers were very happy with the result.

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

#38

Post by jyrkesh »

punnerud wrote: post #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

I'm doing exactly this now on an RPi running Docker Swarm. Only difference is that I pay Namecheap for the domain, so Cloudflare is free...I know Swarm is outdated, but it was super easy to start being useful on just one node, now it's running all sorts of things for me.

But yeah, it's just a shell script that hits the API every 10 mins.

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

#39

Post by TurboHaskal »

ForHackernews wrote: post #26
twblalock wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

Why do you think people write these blog posts.

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

#40

Post by sgt »

collyw wrote: post #28
ForHackernews wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We evaluated Kubernetes and chose Nomad instead. It works really well (although not as feature rich as K8s) and it allows smaller teams to understand how the whole setup works. It lowers key man risks, IMO.
Post reply on HN