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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

91–100 of 589 posts

Re: I am building a cloud

#92
post #28
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the feeling that with LLMs in the mix, in-house server management can do a lot more than it used to.

Perhaps it saves some time looking through the docs, but do you really trust an LLM to do the actual work?

By this point? Absolutely. They still get stuck in rabbit holes and go down the wrong path sometimes, so it's not fully fire and forget, but if you aren't taking advantage of LLMs to perform generic sysadmin drudgery, you're wasting your time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Re: I am building a cloud

#93

> Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig. So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined netw…

If you spin up Kubernetes for "a couple of containers to run your web app", I think you're doing something wrong in the first place, also coupled with your comment about adding SDN to Kubernetes. People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.

I totally agree, but that's not what happens in reality: the average devops knows k8s and will slap it onto anything they see (if only so they can put in on their resume). The average manager hears about k8s, gets convinced they need and hires beforementioned devops to build it.

Re: I am building a cloud

#95
post #11

i just use Hetzner. Everything which cloud companies provide just cost so much, my own postgres running with HA setup and backup cost me 1/10th the price of RDS or CloudSQL service running in production over 10 years with no downtime. i directly autoscales instances off of the Metrics harvested from graphana it works fine for us, we've autoscaler configured via webhooks. Very simple and never failed us. i don't know…

Companies buy cloud services because they want to reduce in-house server management and operations, for them it's a trade-off with hiring the right people. But you are right, when you can find the right people doing it yourself can be a lot cheaper.

In some sense I'm starting to think it has more to do with accounting. Hardware, datacenters and software licenses (unless it's a subscription, which is probably is these days) are capital expenses, cloud is an operation expense. Management in a lot of companies hates capital expenditures, presumable because it forces long term thinking, i.e. three to five years for server hardware. Better to go the cloud route and have "room for manoeuvrability". I worked for a company that would hire consultants, because "you can fire those at two weeks notice, with no severance". Sure, but they've been here for five years now, at twice the cost of actual staff. Companies like that also loves the cloud.

Whether or not cloud is viable for a company is very individual. It's very hard to pin point a size or a use case that will always make cloud the "correct" choice.

Re: I am building a cloud

#96

> Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig. So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined netw…

I don't get it, I think that k8s is the best software written since win95. It redefines computing in the same way IMHO. I have some experience in working with k8s on prod and I loved every moment of it. I'm definitely missing something.

Re: I am building a cloud

#97
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it difficult to configure Tailscale for my use case because they seem to completely not support making ACL rules based on the identity of the device rather than a part of the address space. I'm not configuring a router here, I'm configuring a peer-to-peer networking layer... or at least I'm supposed to be...

I remember from the docs you can use node names. At the very least you can use tags for sure. Assign tags to nodes and define the ACL based on those.

Last I read the docs while troubleshooting this very problem, you cannot specify node names as the source or destination of a grant. You can specify direct IP address ranges, node groups (including autogenerated ones) or tags, but not names.

Tags permanently erase the user identity from a device, and disable things like Taildrop. When I tried to assign a tag for ACLs, I found that I then could not remove it and had to endure a very laborous process to re-register a Tailscale device that I added to Tailscale for the express purpose of remotely accessing

Re: I am building a cloud

#98

Potentially useful context: OP is one of the cofounders of Tailscale. > Traditional Cloud 1.0 companies sell you a VM with a default of 3000 IOPS, while your laptop has 500k. Getting the defaults right (and the cost of those defaults right) requires careful thinking through the stack. I wish them a lot of luck! I admire the vision and am definitely a target customer, I'm just afraid this goes the way things always go…

i was just curious so i tested this actually. Using fio Hetzner (cx23, 2vCPU, 4 GB) ~3900 IOPS (read/write) ~15.3 MB/s avg latency ~2.1 ms 99.9th percentile ≈ ~5 ms max ≈ ~7 ms DigitalOcean (SFO1 / 2 GB RAM / 30 GB Disk) ~3900 IOPS (same!) ~15.7 MB/s (same!) avg latency ~2.1 ms (same!) 99.9th percentile ≈ ~18 ms max ≈ ~85 ms (!!) using sequential dd Hetzner: 1.9 GB/s DO: 850 MB/s Using low end plan on both but this H…

I love Hetzner so much. I'm not affiliated I'm a really happy customer these guys just do everything right.

Re: I am building a cloud

#99

> Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig. So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined netw…

I thought we collectively learned this with stack overflows engineering blog years ago.

Scale vertically until you can't because you're unlikely to hit a limit and if you do you'll have enough money to pay someone else to solve it.

Docker is amazing development tooling but it makes for horrible production infrastructure.

Re: I am building a cloud

#100
This looks like an excellent platform for running a "homelab" in the cloud (no, the irony is not lost on me) for lighter stuff like Readeck, Calibre-web, Immich. Maybe even Home Assistant too if we can find a way (Tailscale?) to get the mDNS/multicast traffic tunnelled.
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