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Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

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Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#51

Post by bigj0n »

spottybanana wrote: post #43
michaelt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't really understand the point in investing time in it, as it feels like one of those things you learn on the job as it comes up I don't need to spend my time developing skills for the job I've already got , I need to develop skills for the next job I'll have > most businesses don't even have a compelling reason to switch from the old 3 tier monolith architecture. ...thus showing I can't rely on my employer to k…

You're betting on the technology demand to move to certain direction. To me it feels like investing in stocks, but instead of betting with your money you are betting with your time and brain cycles invested. What makes you so confident that this piece of technology will flourish compared to so many others?

Kuburnetes is lightweight, extensible and based on open standards, which is the recipe for a long-term solution in this space. It also has first class support in all of the major cloud providers and has an established tooling ecosystem around it.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#52

Post by candiddevmike »

punnerud wrote: post #7

If you want to use your own domain you can turn Cloudflare into a DDNS by frequently checking your public-IP for changes and update the records on Cloudflare using their API if it change (this is free, except the domain cost): https://github.com/punnerud/cloudflare-ddns

You can also use ddclient, it is available on most Linux distributions.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#53

Post by vetinari »

rmdashrfstar wrote: post #29
mosselman wrote: post #23

You could sell the MacBook and build a decent raspberrypi cluster with the money you make on it.

A big problem is local storage provisioner for kubernetes is still not GA. I want to use an SSD attached to one master, and use that as storage for the other RPIs. Doing this is still undocumented/the Wild West.

Disclaimer: k8s beginner here.

As far as I understand, local storage provisioner is for the node local storage; the storage doesn't follow the workload to whatever node is the pod scheduled, but schedules the pod to the node containing the storage device. It doesn't allow for pods to access local storage outside the node.

So for worker nodes using storage on the master node, isn't it better to use either iSCSI or NFS?

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#54

Post by bluedino »

captn3m0 wrote: post #32

I used to run minikube on my MBA till last year (Was running Arch). It was very underpowered to run a cluster, as I guess they'll soon find out. This was a MBA 2015, so the OP's 2012 MBA is even less powerful. The fans would start whirring, and the device was immediately unusable for anything else. I switched to using microk8s, which is slightly better, but still makes the device crawls. The MBA also only has 4GB RAM…

Installing Linux on the MacBook Air would be a huge improvement. Less overhead and not having to use VirtualBox to run Linux anyway...

I have an old T460S, I ran VirtualBox on it for a short while, it was so slow it felt like something was wrong.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#55

Post by bluedino »

An HP or Dell USFF PC would be a great alternative. Something like an OptiPlex 7010 or 800 G2. You can pick them up for $50 used, if you need more power you can add as large of an SSD as you want plus 16GB of RAM, they're small and quiet and can run Linux.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#56

Post by dillonmckay »

spottybanana wrote: post #43
michaelt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't really understand the point in investing time in it, as it feels like one of those things you learn on the job as it comes up I don't need to spend my time developing skills for the job I've already got , I need to develop skills for the next job I'll have > most businesses don't even have a compelling reason to switch from the old 3 tier monolith architecture. ...thus showing I can't rely on my employer to k…

You're betting on the technology demand to move to certain direction. To me it feels like investing in stocks, but instead of betting with your money you are betting with your time and brain cycles invested. What makes you so confident that this piece of technology will flourish compared to so many others?

Especially as the labor market is about to be flooded with devops k8s folks, looking to apply their skills.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#57

Post by dillonmckay »

mosselman wrote: post #23

You could sell the MacBook and build a decent raspberrypi cluster with the money you make on it.

Would you not want to stay with an Intel-based CPU?

https://hackernoon.com/diy-kubernetes-cluster-with-x86-stick...

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#58

Post by eeZah7Ux »

ForHackernews wrote: post #26
twblalock wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One benefit is to learn how to admin a Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes knowledge is becoming an important job skill, and if your current employer does not use Kubernetes, you'll need to learn it on your own. > Which IMO, most businesses don't even have a compelling reason to switch from the old 3 tier monolith architecture. Compelling reasons include self-healing, autoscaling, and official support from all major cloud…

This sounds a lot like CV-driven development, rather than any actual use cases. That's not to say it's a bad idea for an individual dev, but might not say great things about our industry.

Kubernetes is the 2020's equivalent of "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" of 1980s.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#59

Post by hnarn »

wpietri wrote: post #45

For what it's worth, I built one like this on an old Linux laptop. I then moved my home lighting controller onto it as a test. Some months later my house lights stopped working, and I had to spend a few hours applying snippets semi-randomly from Stack Overflow. It could be the problem was due to expired Kubernetes certificates, or it could be something else. Either way, my conclusion was that Kubernetes is really mea…

I have a strong feeling that the added complexity of Kubernetes does not give most use cases a net payoff for hobbyists. A lot of the quirks and monkey wrenching with both Docker and Kubernetes seems to be like problems that in many cases were solved in traditional _NIX systems decades ago. I'm sure there are benefits of throwing some of that architecture out for some scenarios but people shouldn't treat it as a new paradigm by default.

Re: Converting an old MacBook into an always-on personal Kubernetes cluster

#60

Post by eeZah7Ux »

michaelt wrote: post #41
s-km wrote: post #8

What sort of fun projects/experiments do people do with a super low powered k8s cluster locally? I'm kind of in this weird position where I understand the benefits and use of k8s, but I: a) Can't think of any cutesy distributed systems/microservices type thing that I could or would want to run on a low power machine locally (lack of processing power or ISP getting pissed off @ massive amount of traffic if you're e.g.…

> Don't really understand the point in investing time in it, as it feels like one of those things you learn on the job as it comes up I don't need to spend my time developing skills for the job I've already got , I need to develop skills for the next job I'll have > most businesses don't even have a compelling reason to switch from the old 3 tier monolith architecture. ...thus showing I can't rely on my employer to k…

COBOL is still in demand and highly paid.
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