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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

331–340 of 589 posts

Re: I am building a cloud

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 know that "resume-driven development" exists, where the tradeoffs between approaches aren't about the technical fit of the solution but the career trajectory. I've seen people making plain workstation preparation scripts using Rust, only to have something to flex about in interviews. I'm not surprised even in the slightest that DevOps workers will slap k8s on everything, to show "real industry experience" in a job…

Your first example sound very sensible to me?

Using new technology in something small and unimportant like a setup script is a perfect way to experiment and learn. It would be irresponsible to build something important as the first thing you do in a new language.

Re: I am building a cloud

#333
as an exe customer i'm really happy to see this. i don't even use half of their features (such as the https proxy, or the LLM agent) but it's just a reliable computer that i can ssh into from my laptop or phone. i use hetzner too in the same way for a bit of redundancy but exe seems less likely to delete all my machines and data.

every time i've had an issue or question, it's been the same sympathetic people helping me out. over email, in plain text.

Re: I am building a cloud

#334
HeavyBit is absolutely gross. I've heard lots of horrible things about them from multiple founders.

One of my friends was told to come to a sex party that was all male and he is straight. It soured his relationship with the firm so much he ended up winding down the business.

Re: I am building a cloud

#335
There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters.

I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall one particular incident where we had a complete blackout for about an hour. The people predisposed to hating Kubernetes did everything they could to blame it all on that "shitty k8s system." Turns out the service in question simply DOS'd by opening up tens of thousands of ports in a matter of seconds when a particular scenario occurred.

I'm neither in the k8s is the future nor k8s is total trash. It's a good system for when you genuinely need it. I've never understand the other two sides of the equation.

Re: I am building a cloud

#336
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense, Kubernetes is just a portable platform for running Linux services, even on a single node using something like K3s. I almost see it as being an extension of the Linux OS layer.

Then why can't we put a wrapper onto systemd and make that into a light weight k8s?

This may be familiarity bias, but I often find `kubectl` and related tools like `k9s` more ergonomic than `systemctl`/`journalctl`, even for managing simple single-replica processes that are bound to the host network.

Re: I am building a cloud

#337
post #246
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DevOps here. The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing depar…

The following happened to a friend. Around the time of the pandemic, a company wanted to make some Javascript code do a kind of transformation over large number of web-pages (a billion or so, fetched as WARC files from the web archive). Their engineers suggested setting up SmartOS VMs and deploying Manta (which would have allowed the use of the Javascript code in a totally unmodified way -- map-reduce from the comman…

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Re: I am building a cloud

#338

There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall…

The complaints I see about Kubernetes are typically more about one of two things: (a) this looks complex to learn, and I don't have a need for it - existing deployment patterns solve my use case, or (b) Kubernetes is much less inefficient than running software on bare-metal (energy or cost.)

Usually they go hand in hand.

Re: I am building a cloud

#339

> 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.

Doing Kubernetes like doing Agile is mandatory nowadays. I've been asked to package a 20 line worth of bash script as docker image so it can be delivered via CI/CD pipeline via Kubernetes pods in cloud.

Value is not that I got job done at a day's notice. It is black mark that I couldn't package it as per industry best practices.

Not doing would mean out of job/work. Whether it is happening correctly is not something decision makers care as long it is getting done anyhow.

Re: I am building a cloud

#340
post #338

There's a common conversation that goes on around AI: some people swear its a complete waste of time and total boondoggle, some that its a good tool when used correctly, and others that its the future and nothing else matters. I see the same thing happen with Kubernetes. I've run clusters from various sizes for about half a decade now. I've never once had an incident that wasn't caused by the product itself. I recall…

The complaints I see about Kubernetes are typically more about one of two things: (a) this looks complex to learn, and I don't have a need for it - existing deployment patterns solve my use case, or (b) Kubernetes is much less inefficient than running software on bare-metal (energy or cost.) Usually they go hand in hand.

The funniest thing is that kubernetes was designed for bare metal running, not cloud...
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