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I ported Kubernetes to the browser

ngrok.com

51–60 of 110 posts

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to come across as diminishing OPs work. But it was alot of work to simulate what Kubernetes is doing.

Sure - but to use another analogy... If someone said they "ported git to the browser" but it was just a UI for git workflows it would be equally misleading. I think because that isn't what "porting" is. In such a case I would expect git - the version control code and diffing - running in browser JavaScript in the same way DOOM is when someone says they ported DOOM to the browser. That's what porting means, right? Sin…

I don't think this analogy holds. Version control and diffing are some core capabilities of git. Sam lists core capabilities of k8s that his port can handle: pod lifecycles, container garbage collection, IP allocation, etc.

My understanding is that the interesting part of k8s is how it orchestrates containers, which this port can do a lot of. Your comments imply that a core component of k8s is actually running containers (rather than orchestrating them), but I don't think that's right. That would be the job of containerd or the operating system, depending at what level you're looking at. Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong about any of this!

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#52
post #29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your prior is that token costs are only going to go up. Doesn't stuff like GLM 5.2 and Deepseek change this? I.e. something close to Opus 4.5 that runs 10X + more performantly.

No, because those loans still have to be repaid.

No, they don't, they can also be defaulted on/written off. Open weights are there to stay, plus research, plus the GPUs, just the power needs to be paid.

There's a limit to price hikes due to competition, and open weights can't collude so closed weight companies don't have that much wiggle room to raise prices unless they are much better than open weights.

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - but to use another analogy... If someone said they "ported git to the browser" but it was just a UI for git workflows it would be equally misleading. I think because that isn't what "porting" is. In such a case I would expect git - the version control code and diffing - running in browser JavaScript in the same way DOOM is when someone says they ported DOOM to the browser. That's what porting means, right? Sin…

I don't think this analogy holds. Version control and diffing are some core capabilities of git. Sam lists core capabilities of k8s that his port can handle: pod lifecycles, container garbage collection, IP allocation, etc. My understanding is that the interesting part of k8s is how it orchestrates containers, which this port can do a lot of. Your comments imply that a core component of k8s is actually running contai…

To me the interesting part is the use case.

To call it a port that doesn’t actually work? Idk seems like a baseline requirement.

It’s like saying you ported YouTube to a calculator but it doesn’t play videos because the most interesting part is the search algorithm, and it’s for educational purposes not functionality.

That just isn’t a port.

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#55
post #39
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because those loans still have to be repaid.

Could you explain your mental model of the situation a bit more? Let's take something like GML 5.2 that is open source - anyone can run it on NVIDIA or AMD chips. People are currently making money by running GLM 5.2 Nvidia and AMD chips and selling inference on aggregators like openRouter. So the cost to serve is like cost of Chip or financing for Chip + power and rackspace somewhere. We basically know that each year…

> Could you explain your mental model of the situation a bit more?

I'm talking specifically about US-based AI companies / hardware companies and their circular investments and their customer-facing pricing.

> We basically know that each year you will be able to server exponentially more inference per $ on Nvidia and AMD hardware as it gets to newer generations, so why would you expect the cost of inference on open models to also increase?

Because the cost of training continues to increase while getting increasingly harder and harder to make gains. On top of that, there is the delay between investing in the datacenters, staff, running the training, operational costs of customer use, etc and actually recouping profit via customer sales. Your costs go up because their costs go up. Likely even more so now because of the increased risk the US Gov will shut down sales and use of their newest models. That risk will get bundled in with pricing.

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#56
post #52
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because those loans still have to be repaid.

No, they don't, they can also be defaulted on/written off. Open weights are there to stay, plus research, plus the GPUs, just the power needs to be paid. There's a limit to price hikes due to competition, and open weights can't collude so closed weight companies don't have that much wiggle room to raise prices unless they are much better than open weights.

> There's a limit to price hikes due to competition

Unless you say you have the best model in the world, and then everybody will fight to use it.

> No, they don't, they can also be defaulted on/written off.

Bye, bye world economy.

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#57

What are you using to replace etcd here? Where is state stored?

They implemented a store in TypeScript: https://github.com/ngrok/webernetes/blob/main/src/cluster/st...

etcd is not a requirement of k8s, plenty of clusters out there use non-etcd stores. E.g. k3s/k3d can use sqlite, all of the big cloud providers use their own in-house datastores instead of etcd.

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#58
giving yourself (or your llm) infinite future work in maintaining all that duplicated kubernetes source code is a bad idea, surely? the author notes they could have compiled the kubernetes to wasm, but doesn't due to... bundle size? i haven't tried, but surely it wouldn't work because all os-level functionality would cause panics.

also the title is false

Re: I ported Kubernetes to the browser

#60
post #58

giving yourself (or your llm) infinite future work in maintaining all that duplicated kubernetes source code is a bad idea, surely? the author notes they could have compiled the kubernetes to wasm, but doesn't due to... bundle size? i haven't tried, but surely it wouldn't work because all os-level functionality would cause panics. also the title is false

Why is the title false?
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