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Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

aranya.tech

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Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#51

Post by antonvs »

hosh wrote: post #44
antonvs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in a physical hardware, on-premise scenario, it's still easier to scale horizontally than vertically in almost all cases, for all the reasons I mentioned. That's a big reason why Kubernetes was adopted at an unprecedented pace at medium to large organizations - because it helps manage that approach.

They could have chosen Mesos instead. Kubernetes had other characteristics that allowed it to be adopted far and wide besides the ability to scale horizontally.

I said a big reason, not the only reason.

Besides, Mesos wasn't a good alternative for most companies, so saying "they could have chosen it instead" is a bit theoretical. Mesos was ambitious, but that made it less suitable for a plug & play system that fit easily into existing corporate systems, which had already adopted containers heavily.[] Another reason for Kubernetes' popularity is it didn't try to be a big leap forward the way Mesos did.

[]The Marathon container support for Mesos was released about a year after Kubernetes, but if you were going to set up a system for distributed orchestration of containers, it didn't make much sense to bring Mesos along for the ride. There's a reason Mesos is in Apache heaven now (the Attic.)

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#52

Post by DeathArrow »

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 Supposedly because a box with dual AMD EPYC 9965, 12TB of RAM, 10 x Nvidia H200and 1PB storage might not be enough to run the latest version of Solitaire or Minesweeper and you need more oomph.

Or maybe you want to run stuffz on 1000 x Raspberry Pi just for fun.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#53

Post by juvoly »

hosh wrote: post #30
juvoly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never understood the appeal of Kubernetes to developers, outside of a massive deployments. Always felt like a poor man's Linux for those that insist on using apple or windows desktop.

I am not sure I understand this argument. Kubernetes typically runs on Linux. I use an Apple laptop, work mostly with headless Linux VMs and Kubernetes. What is a “poor man’s Linux”?

Does your apple laptop run Linux or MacOS? Do you run Kubernetes locally or only when network permits? What was the reason for targeting Linux rather than MacOS? And what in this context is the value add of using Kubernetes for your development?

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#54

Post by MobiusHorizons »

hosh wrote: post #31
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #3

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.

Scale isn’t the only reason. Sometimes you want resource isolation and self-healing, something that is useful if you want a personal swarm of AI agents.

I get how running in a container or vm would help with that, but why would you want to cluster multiple of them? Are you isolating the agents from one another?

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#55

Post by 0123456789ABCDE »

skybrian wrote: post #47
0123456789ABCDE wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you won't have to deal with yaml for these clusters let me draw this out the way i've been playing with: a classic vm exists, and supports kvm — this means you can run stuff like firecracker in there an ssh server runs on this vm, and when you connect to it, you're dropped into a repl/tui where you can list existing microvms, create new ones, or destroy existing ones, and, of particular use, you can attach to one. as…

Sounds like a nice setup. The way exe.dev does things seems somewhat similar.

yep, a lot of this is based on what exe.dev already does, some of it takes more inspiration from sprites.dev, and others are wishlist items

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#56

Post by andai »

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?

Configuring one box is enough of a pain. I guess AI fixes that though. I don't need to learn box wrangling if the boxes wrangle themselves.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#57

Post by OutOfHere »

A cluster is not happening for the people at large, considering individual systems still can be very powerful and very expensive. This cost won't really come down until we have stably been at 7 angstorms for a decade. This probably means by 2045 at the very earliest. Until then, personal clusters seem extraneous.

Wirh regard to AI, hopefully we can run it efficiently on an ASIC.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#58

Post by hosh »

juvoly wrote: post #53
hosh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure I understand this argument. Kubernetes typically runs on Linux. I use an Apple laptop, work mostly with headless Linux VMs and Kubernetes. What is a “poor man’s Linux”?

Does your apple laptop run Linux or MacOS? Do you run Kubernetes locally or only when network permits? What was the reason for targeting Linux rather than MacOS? And what in this context is the value add of using Kubernetes for your development ?

I build production Kubernetes and cloud infra for work. When I run Kubernetes locally, it is because I am developing operators or manifests for application workloads. Kubernetes is not the “value add” for my dev workflow, it is literally what I am developing.

I have run Linux laptops before. After running it for five years, I came to the conclusion that it did not make a good laptop for my use-case. Poor suspend-resume support, poor wireless networking support means I can not just pick and go. (And no one has yet to replicate Apple’s trackpad experience). So yes, I run Apple laptop with MacOS and use my TUI tools, sometimes with Linux running in an VM, sometime remotely to a full headless VM with my full dev suite via mosh because I use cli and TUI for dev.

Your turn. You still have not defined “poor man’s Linux”.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#59

Post by hosh »

antonvs wrote: post #51
hosh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have chosen Mesos instead. Kubernetes had other characteristics that allowed it to be adopted far and wide besides the ability to scale horizontally.

I said a big reason, not the only reason. Besides, Mesos wasn't a good alternative for most companies, so saying "they could have chosen it instead" is a bit theoretical. Mesos was ambitious, but that made it less suitable for a plug & play system that fit easily into existing corporate systems, which had already adopted containers heavily.[ ] Another reason for Kubernetes' popularity is it didn't try to be a big lea…

That is not very insightful. Your thesis started with the idea of elastic horizontal scaling.

Mesos was designed from ideas with HPC and catered to that. Large hardware capex, which is not elastic. Containers did not make sense in that world when it was architected, and it was retrofited into Mesos's architectural foundation.

Kubernetes was designed for a wide variety of workloads, and designed to be composable, versatile, and extensible. It has a far more decentralized approach, an antithesis to Mesos's Data Center as an OS approach. It isn't that Kubernetes did not try to do too much. It's that they laid a much more flexible foundation.

It turns out, Kubernetes was a better fit for a many more use-cases, even beyond large and medium sized enterprises. Kubernetes works pretty well at the edge and locally as well, and it runs many ML workloads on the other end of scale.

This is not theoretical.

Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

#60

Post by antonvs »

hosh wrote: post #59
antonvs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said a big reason, not the only reason. Besides, Mesos wasn't a good alternative for most companies, so saying "they could have chosen it instead" is a bit theoretical. Mesos was ambitious, but that made it less suitable for a plug & play system that fit easily into existing corporate systems, which had already adopted containers heavily.[ ] Another reason for Kubernetes' popularity is it didn't try to be a big lea…

That is not very insightful. Your thesis started with the idea of elastic horizontal scaling. Mesos was designed from ideas with HPC and catered to that. Large hardware capex, which is not elastic. Containers did not make sense in that world when it was architected, and it was retrofited into Mesos's architectural foundation. Kubernetes was designed for a wide variety of workloads, and designed to be composable, vers…

Your version of the story is fine, but the point remains, Mesos was not a good fit for most medium to large organizations at the time they began adopting Kubernetes. As such, those organizations rationally did not "choose Mesos instead."
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