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Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

aranya.tech

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Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#11

Post by cedws »

aliasxneo wrote: post #8

No idea about ClusterOS, but I would recommend IncusOS if you're looking for a nice clustering solution. Incus has become indispensable in my homelab over the past few months. It's what I put on my bare metal machines and then spin up Talos Linux VMs for day job practice.

I really liked IncusOS but it still felt quite primitive compared to Proxmox. I also didn’t really like the way it bundles VMs and containers into an ‘instance’ concept, it made the UI and management via Terraform confusing. Had a lot of problems with the TF provider too.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#13

Post by wmf »

DeathArrow wrote: post #10

I don't see how an operating system can work for a cluster. You can have more than one CPU and more than one storage connected to one mainboard and that works because the interconnect fabric is very fast. We don't have have the possibility to connect different computers at the same kind of speed that would let them work together seamlessly.

Check out Plan 9 and Mosix. They weren't super fast but they worked.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#15

Post by Grimburger »

skybrian wrote: post #2

The article assumes there are people who want clusters. But a single Linux VM in the cloud can scale pretty far. Separate VM's for different apps works well for isolation. Why do I need a cluster?

> Why do I need a cluster?

Uptime, self healing, reproducibility, separating the system from app. There's probably a half dozen more.

K8s comes with resource consumption tax certainly but for anything beyond the trivial it's usually justified.

> Separate VM's for different apps works well for isolation

Sounds inefficient along with a lot more work doing the plumbing than simply writing a 100 lines of yaml.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#18

Post by JustinGarrison »

aliasxneo wrote: post #8

No idea about ClusterOS, but I would recommend IncusOS if you're looking for a nice clustering solution. Incus has become indispensable in my homelab over the past few months. It's what I put on my bare metal machines and then spin up Talos Linux VMs for day job practice.

How does the IncusOS API compare to Talos? When I first looked at it it seemed very minimal and I didn't see a lot of options for more complex installs (eg network bonding, disk partitioning).

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#19

Post by hephaes7us »

skybrian wrote: post #2

The article assumes there are people who want clusters. But a single Linux VM in the cloud can scale pretty far. Separate VM's for different apps works well for isolation. Why do I need a cluster?

Isn't there a meaningful sense in which "separate VMs for different apps" constitutes a cluster?

The "cooperative task" they're engaged in is just, broadly, meeting your needs, whatever they are.

The isolation is a desirable property, and I agree this is much preferable to a highly inter-coupled bunch of machines, and also that thia stretches the typical sense in which we refer to a "compute cluster", but I don't think it's an entirely invalid framing of the term.

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