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?
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.
Yeah I’ve been doing this with tailscale and a single vps and it’s been wonderful. Unless you’re planning to have millions of users I don’t think there’s any reason to have a cluster.
Maybe they’re assuming some massive amount of compute will be necessary for future tasks? Self hosted LLMs? I’m currently finding it difficult to come up with more uses for my vps beyond hosting trillium and some personal applications I’ve made
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.
No idea about ClusterOS, but I would recommend IncusOS if you're looking for a nice clustering solution. Incus has become indispensable in my homelab over the past few months. It's what I put on my bare metal machines and then spin up Talos Linux VMs for day job practice.
I really liked IncusOS but it still felt quite primitive compared to Proxmox. I also didn’t really like the way it bundles VMs and containers into an ‘instance’ concept, it made the UI and management via Terraform confusing. Had a lot of problems with the TF provider too.
I’m not sure quite what this is trying to say. My laptop is already a personal cluster — it has 16 cores, lots of storage, a fast network, I run VMs on it. It’s been the case for a long time that you can run bursty jobs in the cloud if you need more power for a brief period than whatever is currently locally affordable. That’s kind of what the cloud is for, really. So what’s new?
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!
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.
> Why do I need a cluster?
Uptime, self healing, reproducibility. There's probably a half dozen more.
At a certain point the resource consumption of k8s justifies its usage incredibly well.
> Separate VM's for different apps works well for isolation
Sounds inefficient along with a lot more work doing the plumbing
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.
Yeah I’ve been doing this with tailscale and a single vps and it’s been wonderful. Unless you’re planning to have millions of users I don’t think there’s any reason to have a cluster.
Maybe they’re assuming some massive amount of compute will be necessary for future tasks? Self hosted LLMs? I’m currently finding it difficult to come up with more uses for my vps beyond hosting trillium and some personal applications I’ve made
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.
No idea about ClusterOS, but I would recommend IncusOS if you're looking for a nice clustering solution. Incus has become indispensable in my homelab over the past few months. It's what I put on my bare metal machines and then spin up Talos Linux VMs for day job practice.
I really liked IncusOS but it still felt quite primitive compared to Proxmox. I also didn’t really like the way it bundles VMs and containers into an ‘instance’ concept, it made the UI and management via Terraform confusing. Had a lot of problems with the TF provider too.
The best part of this article is in the footnotes:
> see CEO of Tailscale apenwarr's vibe-researched thread
“Vibe-research” is now a core part of my vocabulary.
I’m not sure quite what this is trying to say. My laptop is already a personal cluster — it has 16 cores, lots of storage, a fast network, I run VMs on it. It’s been the case for a long time that you can run bursty jobs in the cloud if you need more power for a brief period than whatever is currently locally affordable. That’s kind of what the cloud is for, really. So what’s new?
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
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.
Check out Plan 9 and Mosix. They weren't super fast but they worked.
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!