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Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

carlosrdrz.es

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Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#21

Post by solatic »

Oh man, the original article went way over the author's head. The point of the original article was that even though Kubernetes is primarily useful for tackling the challenges involved with running many workloads at enterprise scale, it can also be used to run small hobbyist workloads at a price point acceptable for hobbyist projects.

Does that mean that Kubernetes should now be used for all hobbyist projects? No. If I'm thinking of playing around with a Raspberry Pi or other SBC, do I need to install Kubernetes on the SBC first? If I'm thinking of playing around with IoT or serverless, should I dump AWS- or GCE-proprietary tools because nobody will ever run anything that that can't run on Kubernetes ever again? If I'm going to play around with React or React Native, should I write up a backend just so I can have something that I can run in a Kubernetes cluster, because all hobbyist projects must run Kubernetes now, because it's cheap enough for hobbyist projects? If I'm going to play around with machine learning at home, buy a machine with a heavy GPU, figure out how to get Kubernetes to schedule my machine learning workload correctly instead of just running it directly on that machine, because uhhh maybe someday I'll have three such machines with powerful GPUs plus other home servers for all my other hobbyist projects?

No, no, no, no, no. Clearly.

But maybe I envision my side project turning into full-time startup some day. Maybe I see all the news about Kubernetes and think it would be cool to be more familiar with it. Nah, probably too expensive. Oh wait, I can get something running for $5? Hey, that's pretty neat!

Different people will use different solutions for different project requirements.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#22

Post by Annatar »

"I think the point I'm trying to make is: do you actually need all of this?"

Yep! For any thing which goes beyond the initial viability test, I make an OS package. SmartOS has SMF, so integrating automatic startup/shutdown is as easy as delivering a single SMF manifest, and running svccfg import in the package postinstall. For the configuration, I just make another package which delivers it, edits it dynamically and automatically in postinstall if required, and calls svcadm refresh svc://...

it's easy. It's fast. The OS knows about all my files. I can easily remove it or upgrade it. It's clean. When I'm done, I make another ZFS image for imgadm(1M) to consume and Bob's my uncle.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#23

Post by fcgravalos »

I can't agree more with the author ;).

I work in my day to day 100% and fully dedicated automating Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, maintaining them, monitoring them and creating tools around it. Kubernetes it's a production-grade container orchestrator, it solves really difficult problems but it brings some challenges though. All of their components work distributed across the cluster, including network plugins, firewall policies, the control plane, etc. So be prepared to understand all of it.

Don't get me wrong, I love Kubernetes and if you want to have some fun go for it, but don't use the HA features as an excuse to do it.

But overall saying "NO" to rsync or ansible to deploy your small project just because it's not fancy enough it sounds to me like "Are you really going to the supermarket by car, when there are helicopters out there?"

Great article!

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#24

Post by Annatar »

"Oh man, the original article went way over the author's head."

No, the author of the Kubernetes article completely, so utterly missed the point that it's not even funny: none of those Kubernetes complications are necessary if one runs SmartOS and optionally, as a bonus, Triton.

Since doing something the harder and more complicated way for the same effect is irrational, which presumably the author of the Kubernetes article isn't, I'm compelled to presume that he just didn't know about SmartOS and Triton, or that the person is just interested in boosting their resume rather than researching what the most robust and simplest technology is. If resume boosting with Kubernetes is their goal then their course of action makes sense, but the company where they work won't get the highest reliability and lowest complexity that they could get. So good for them, suboptimal for their (potential) employer. And that's also a concern, moreover, it's a highly professional one. I'm looking through the employer's eyes on this, but then again, I really like sleeping through entire nights without an incident. A simple and robust architecture is a big part of that. Resume boosting isn't.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#25

Post by talkingquickly »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #15
vbsteven wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I'll check it out. I have quite some experience working with Kubernetes clusters for my larger clients. Usually for clients that are big enough to have their own AWS account. The thing I am still on the fence about is whether I should go for a DIY Kubernetes setup on one or more Hetzner dedicated machines (cheap, more work, less scalable) or if I should just shell out for AWS and run an easily scalable cluste…

Well I think that's more of a cost question -- AWS can get expensive pretty quickly. Three t2.micros (one coordinator, 2 nodes) are absolutely pitiful in terms of processing power but that's already ~$30/month when you could get a way beefier machine on Hetzner whether dedicated or cloud (also Scaleway[0]). I'm a fan of Hetzner because I think their cheap dedicated machines are worth the operational costs for me, and…

I'd be really interested in how you're approaching persistence? I've also found self managing clusters provisioned with kuibeadm fairly hassle free until persistence is involved. Not so much setting it up (e.g. rook is fairly easy to get going with now), but the ongoing maintenance, dealing with transitioining workloads between nodes etc etc.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#26

Post by matthewmacleod »

vbsteven wrote: post #8

I've been thinking about setting up a small Kubernetes cluster for hosting some smaller client projects (read websites, shopping carts, API's, admin panels). My current setup uses a couple of Hetzner dedicated machines and services are deployed with ansible playbooks. The playbooks install and configure nginx, install the right version of ruby/java/php/postgres, configure and start systemd services. These playbooks e…

This is the sort of thing that I think a containerised deployment platform can really help with, and I'm doing much the same – specifically because it completely avoids interactions between applications' environments.

But I would recommend looking at the Hashicorp stack as a possible alternative, which might be entirely suitable for your use-case without the complexity of Kubernetes. This involves running Nomad and Consul to provide cluster scheduling and service discovery respectively - these are both single binaries with minimal configuration. Then you'd need some kind of front-end load-balancer like nginx or traefik which uses Consul to decide where to route requests.

It doesn't cover all the use-cases and features that Kubernetes does, but it does have the benefit of being much more straightforward to work with, so definitely worth considering!

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#27

Post by tannhaeuser »

jitl wrote: post #4

I’m itching to replace my home server’s FreeBSD with Linux and Kubernetes. I use it (& build dev tools for others) at work plenty so for me, the learning curve is in the past. I’m not sure if I would recommend this journey for others, but I also wouldn’t recommend FreeBSD to anyone, either. In both cases, you know what you’re getting in to - something complex, opinionated, powerful, and industrial strength.

You'll know this already but I'd say when you're coming from FreeBSD you'll be disappointed with Docker in particular, because it serves no purpose in the (usually) well-organized BSD world where the good stuff is built from source, and developed to POSIX guidelines most of the time anyway. Docker is just a workaround for the perceived mess of shared libraries in the Linux world of multiple O/S vendors (by not using shared libs in the first place which could be solved by statically linking everything), and FreeBSD's jails is IMHO superior as sandbox technology anyway.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#28

Post by comboy »

In my opinion, the best technology for personal projects is the one that you don't know yet. They are a great opportunity to play around stuff which really is the only way of learning something new.

Unless the personal project is something that you really care about, potential startup or something like that, then obviously you choose something that you are already proficient in because then it's about getting stuff done and moving forward.

So while it may make sense to discuss what technology is good or bad for some kind of companies, I think we won't arrive at any ultimate conclusion like "X is good/bad for personal projects".

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#29

Post by erikb »

vbsteven wrote: post #8

I've been thinking about setting up a small Kubernetes cluster for hosting some smaller client projects (read websites, shopping carts, API's, admin panels). My current setup uses a couple of Hetzner dedicated machines and services are deployed with ansible playbooks. The playbooks install and configure nginx, install the right version of ruby/java/php/postgres, configure and start systemd services. These playbooks e…

Your current setup is probably already quite stable. Why switch to another? You probably underestimate the learning effort and the required effort to keep your stuff running in a long-term maintainable way on k8s.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#30

Post by malgregator »

vbsteven wrote: post #8

I've been thinking about setting up a small Kubernetes cluster for hosting some smaller client projects (read websites, shopping carts, API's, admin panels). My current setup uses a couple of Hetzner dedicated machines and services are deployed with ansible playbooks. The playbooks install and configure nginx, install the right version of ruby/java/php/postgres, configure and start systemd services. These playbooks e…

we are using similar setup and ended up using ansible for installing and setuping kubernetes cluster itself together with some other configurations like ipsec between the nodes etc. Learning curve for a new employee is small as every internal project is using the same directory structure and is completely gitops. Actual services are then deployed to the kubernetes and it works great.
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