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Wouldn’t it be cheaper / less complex to scale vertically (eg a large workstation or medium size bare metal server) instead of using clusters? My understanding is that clusters are primarily useful when you want to share a resource from a pool across unpredictable usage, which becomes a moot point once the cluster is personal.
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.
https://commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-time-software/
I mean, I don't do that, but I'll type a prompt.
Clusters are almost never the right answer for most problems: https://yourdatafitsinram.net/
You're drawing an incorrect conclusion from that site. Aside from the fact that "fitting in RAM" is not the only criterion for needing a cluster, the fact that it's possible to fit data into RAM on a single machine doesn't mean that's the most cost-effective, practical, or sensible solution. A big advantage of clusters, and horizontal scaling in general, is the ability to easily dynamically scale to meet demand. If y…
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
I have an irrational soft spot for Apache Mesos. I loved the separation of the resource management from the scheduling. Note to self: do not rabbit hole on this. Hm. Maybe mesos is the manager for my agent sandboxes. No! Bad lowbloodsugar!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're drawing an incorrect conclusion from that site. Aside from the fact that "fitting in RAM" is not the only criterion for needing a cluster, the fact that it's possible to fit data into RAM on a single machine doesn't mean that's the most cost-effective, practical, or sensible solution. A big advantage of clusters, and horizontal scaling in general, is the ability to easily dynamically scale to meet demand. If y…
Not all clusters are elastic. Cloud infrastructure can be, but HPC setups before the cloud were not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're drawing an incorrect conclusion from that site. Aside from the fact that "fitting in RAM" is not the only criterion for needing a cluster, the fact that it's possible to fit data into RAM on a single machine doesn't mean that's the most cost-effective, practical, or sensible solution. A big advantage of clusters, and horizontal scaling in general, is the ability to easily dynamically scale to meet demand. If y…
Not all clusters are elastic. Cloud infrastructure can be, but HPC setups before the cloud were not.
so I guess idk what you mean by 'elastic' here.
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?
as argued by OP, you can see this happening with exe.dev, and less explicitly with sprites.dev
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.
we built machines with RDMA that allowed fast one-sided transfers between memories at a decent fraction of the memory bandwidth. and operating systems that ran services to present a unified operating system interface on top of that.
there is a whole history of distributed operating systems if you're interested
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?
I run a single-node K8s cluster on a dedicated server because it's way cleaner to manage than the previous mess and mix of docker compose + traefik routing + random stuff installed as package on the host.
I can create "vhosts" for practically anything in a declarative manner, and if the cluster blows up, I have 5 small scripts to bootstrap it and all I need is `kubectl apply -k .`.