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Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

blog.alexellis.io

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Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#31

Post by piokoch »

yokaze wrote: post #21
tasqa wrote: post #5

What I'd like to see for change is actually doing the bare metal part itself. I've seen so many k8s showcase posts of this or that, but never actually someone who's running it on actual servers they own and without using any big four cloud API's (I consider Equinix to be part of those too soon...) to handle the LB/Ingress/Network virtualization stuff they provide and still say it is easy to use..

Where do you see the difficulty? I've installed k8s with ansible on baremetal (kubespray), more or less just followed the steps here: https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/production-environment/tool... No network virtualisation, just Calico. Announce the service ips via BGP from each node running the service and ECMP gives you a (poor mans) load-balancing. Ingress gets such a service-ip. I used simply nginx. Important he…

I guess you don't even realize how cryptic is your post for someone uninitiated :)

Calico? Network virtualization? BGP? ECMP? Resilient hashing?

No big surprise all this stuff is easy for you.

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#32

Post by aetimmes »

_jal wrote: post #19
AntiImperialis2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bare-metal refers to running on hardware directly (vs. running on VMs or the cloud). I'm interested to know what you thought it was.

In the dark ages, when running an OS in the way you're referring to 'bare metal' was the default, it meant running something without a traditional kernel underneath it. Not many things are written to do that, of course. Oracle used to offer an installation mode like this. It was generally a gimmick - you pay for a tiny bit of performance with a ton of flexibility. There are probably use cases where it makes sense, bu…

Hmm - what's the overlap between your definition of "bare metal" and the current definition of "embedded"?

I will say, this comment section is the first time I'm hearing about "bare-metal" meaning "without an OS", but the above question is genuine curiosity.

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#33

Post by chasd00 »

AntiImperialis2 wrote: post #15
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #12

I don't entirely understand what's happening here. The title and the post talk a lot about "Bare-Metal", but it also seems to indicate that everything is hosted on servers running Ubuntu. Which, if accurate, seems to be Kubernetes running on Linux, not bare-metal?

Bare-metal refers to running on hardware directly (vs. running on VMs or the cloud). I'm interested to know what you thought it was.

to me, running on "bare metal" means part of your program is setting up the clock for various buses and CPU and you have another little program who's job is to jump to the first address of your real program.

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#34

Post by krab »

tasqa wrote: post #5

What I'd like to see for change is actually doing the bare metal part itself. I've seen so many k8s showcase posts of this or that, but never actually someone who's running it on actual servers they own and without using any big four cloud API's (I consider Equinix to be part of those too soon...) to handle the LB/Ingress/Network virtualization stuff they provide and still say it is easy to use..

I managed a bare metal cluster of 5x 128 GB RAM for a fintech.

Using bare metal servers without VM layer is actually a simplification. Cutting out a layer that's not strictly necessary.

Test environments were in AWS. There is a load balancer outside of the cluster (highly available HAProxy as a service). I wouldn't say it's particularly difficult or easy. It's pretty cost effective. After the initial setup, scripting and testing, is done, you spend at most a few hours per month with maintenance and the difference in cost of severs is huge. Also, unmetered bandwidth.

The pain points are mostly storage (nothing beats redundant network storage ala EBS) and having to plan at least a few months in advance because you're renting larger chunks of HW.

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#35

Post by Damogran6 »

Is it just me, or does this need a QA pass?

Using the 2017 instructions went about like you'd expect in this space, with everything moving as fast as it does.

Using the instructions here has it complaining "Terraform initialized in an empty directory!"

mucking about and thinking the main.tfvars file was a typo and it wanted main.tf got things a little further along then generated another error because it WAS meant to be main.tfvars...

And at this point I'm frustrated, confused, and no closer to understanding the concepts...

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#37

Post by arghwhat »

cassianoleal wrote: post #29
xaduha wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point here is that term bare-metal cannot apply to applications relying on OS features. Unikernels are the closest thing you can use this term in this area.

Wikipedia [0] doesn't agree with you (neither do I, but who am I anyway?): "A bare-metal server is a computer server that hosts one tenant, or consumer, only.[1] The term is used for distinguishing between servers that can host multiple tenants and which utilize virtualisation and cloud hosting.[2] Such servers are used by a single consumer and are not shared between consumers. Each server may run any amount of work…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine. Quoting the important part:

> In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.

Bare-metal server has indeed been used to refer to non-virtualized servers, but it's a misnomer. The current terminology for this is "dedicated server".

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#38

Post by bogomipz »

The post mentions kube-vip. I would be curious to hear peoples experiences with kube-vip. The documentation for kube-vip seems a bit scant unfortunately. Does anyone know how this compares/differs to the MetalLB project?

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#39

Post by arghwhat »

AntiImperialis2 wrote: post #15
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #12

I don't entirely understand what's happening here. The title and the post talk a lot about "Bare-Metal", but it also seems to indicate that everything is hosted on servers running Ubuntu. Which, if accurate, seems to be Kubernetes running on Linux, not bare-metal?

Bare-metal refers to running on hardware directly (vs. running on VMs or the cloud). I'm interested to know what you thought it was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine

> In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.

Re: Bare-Metal Kubernetes with K3s

#40

Post by tyingq »

oblio wrote: post #23
scaladev wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess "bare-metal" is Newspeak for "running directly on hardware without a hypervisor".

It's not "Newspeak". Kubernetes is an application, it runs on an OS. You can call it "Newspeak" if you consider anything after VMs became super popular "Newspeak" (around 2010, I think?). Bare-metal = no VMs or other virtualization involved.

It is somewhat "newspeak", as bare metal has meant "without an OS" in the embedded space for a very long time. This is just a case of two different spaces using the same term for different ideas.
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