6 ms·

Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resource

by nrdvana 5mo ago

Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resources than the smallest VMs, but no remote management interface and can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.

simoncion 5mo ago
> ...no remote management interface... I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. I also bet rachelbythebay has at least one article that talks about the topic. > ...can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic. 1) If your public server serves entirely or nearly-entirely static data, you're going to saturate your network before you saturate the CPU resources on that laptop. 2) Even if it isn't, computers are way faster than folks give them credit for when you're not weighing them down with Kubernetes and/or running swarms of VMs. [0] 3) <https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper-mcsherry.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...> (2015) [0] These are useful tools. But if you're going to be tossing a laptop in a colo (or buying a "tiny linode or [DO] droplet"), YAGNI.
- bigiain 5mo ago
  >> ...no remote management interface... > I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."
  - justsomehnguy 5mo ago
    You really don't know how much it costs, do you? Check https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products these are the cheapest ones.
    - simoncion 5mo ago
      MSRP for remote-capable KVMs is irrelevant. You (the person paying to co-locate hardware) don't buy the KVM that the colo facility uses. The colo facility hooks up the KVM that they own to your hardware and configures it so that you can access it. Once you stop paying to colo your hardware, you take your hardware back (or maybe pay them to dispose of it, I guess) and they keep the KVM, because it's theirs.
    - jiggunjer 5mo ago
      I think a raspberry pi setup would be the cheapest? Not as professional perhaps.
  - simoncion 5mo ago
    > From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: Yeah. I got bored a couple of hours after I posted that speculation and found several other colo facilities that mentioned that they'd do remote KVM. I'd figured that it was a common thing (a fair chunk of hardware you might want to colo either doesn't have IPMI or doesn't have IPMI that's worth a damn), but wasn't sure.
- literalAardvark 5mo ago
  k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). It encourages some dumb decisions that do, such as using Prometheus stack with default settings, but by itself it just eats a lot of ram. Now using CPU limits in k8s with cgroups v1 does hurt performance. But doing that would hurt performance without k8s too.
  - simoncion 5mo ago
    > k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). Sorry, what "k1s" are you referring to? The only projects with that name that I see are either cut-down management CLIs and GUIs that only work with a preexisting Kubernetes cluster, or years-old abandoned proof-of-concept/alpha-grade Kubernetes reimplementations that are completely unsuitable as a Kubernetes replacement. The only actually-functional cut-down Kubernetes I'm aware of is 'minikube'. Minikube requires -at minimum- 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. [0] That doesn't fit on either of the machines 'nrdvana' was talking about... not the "tiny ... digital ocean droplet", with its 1CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB of disk space [1], nor the "tiny linode" (which has roughly the same specs [2]). Given that it's not at all uncommon for discarded laptops to have 4 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and like 250GB of disk, eating 1/4th of the RAM, (intermittently) half of the CPU power, and roughly a tenth of the disk space just for Kubernetes housekeeping kinda sucks. That's pretty damn "heavy", in my judgment. So. Do you have a link to this 'k1s' thing you were talking about? Does it use less than 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk? [0] <https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/> [1] <https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-can-save https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-...> [2] <https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be> [3] [3] Did you know that Linode got bought by Akami? I didn't!
    - literalAardvark 5mo ago
      Sorry I meant k0s. Off by one error at 3 am. There are a couple of things here: first off, minikube isn't tuned for low resources, it's a full k8s packaged for developers. Second, it doesn't burn much CPU at all unless you blew it up and it's churning pods. Third, try to remember that you're running a tool that provides most of what you need to run a service, it's not a bare VM, it comes with reverse proxy, tons of tools, and cluster management. Basically those minimal specs let you actually run quite a lot of stuff on that minikube, they're not just for the management system. k0s needs roughly 500MB RAM and 1.5GB drive to run a controller+worker. Can probably pare k3s down to that as well. And I repeat, this gets you single pane cluster management across all your laptops, reverse proxy, DNS, resource shaping, namespaces, etc. Only big problem with it is that adding distributed storage is quite heavy and unstable (longhorn) or really heavy (ceph), so storage management might need to be manual which is a pain in k8s.
bigiain 5mo ago
> Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet That gets you, what, 1 "vCPU" with maybe a gig of ram and a couple of dozen gig of disk. If you (or a friend) work for a company of any size, there's probably a cupboard full of laptops that won't upgrade to Win11 sitting there doing nothing that you could get for free just by asking the right person. It'll have 4 or 8 cores, each of which is more powerful that the "vCPU" in that droplet. It'll have 8 or maybe 16gig of ram, and at least half a TB of disk and depending on that laptop quite likely to be able to be configured with half a TB of fast nVME storage and a few TB of slower spinning rust storage. If you want 8vCPUs/cores, 16GB of ram, and 500GB of SSD, all of a sudden Digital Ocean looks more like $250/month. If you are somewhere in that grey area where you need more than ivCPU and 1GB of memory, grabbing the laptop out of the cupboard that your PM or one of the admin staff upgraded from last year and shipping not off to a datacenter with your flavour of linux installed seems like it's worth considering. Hell, get together with a friend and have two laptops hosted for 14Euro/month between you, and be each others "failing hardware" backup plan...

by nrdvana 5mo ago

simoncion 5mo ago

> ...no remote management interface... I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. I also bet rachelbythebay has at least one article that talks about the topic. > ...can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic. 1) If your public server serves entirely or nearly-entirely static data, you're going to saturate your network before you saturate the CPU resources on that laptop. 2) Even if it isn't, computers are way faster than folks give them credit for when you're not weighing them down with Kubernetes and/or running swarms of VMs. [0] 3) <https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper-mcsherry.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...> (2015) [0] These are useful tools. But if you're going to be tossing a laptop in a colo (or buying a "tiny linode or [DO] droplet"), YAGNI.

bigiain 5mo ago
>> ...no remote management interface... > I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."
- justsomehnguy 5mo ago
  You really don't know how much it costs, do you? Check https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products these are the cheapest ones.
  - simoncion 5mo ago
    MSRP for remote-capable KVMs is irrelevant. You (the person paying to co-locate hardware) don't buy the KVM that the colo facility uses. The colo facility hooks up the KVM that they own to your hardware and configures it so that you can access it. Once you stop paying to colo your hardware, you take your hardware back (or maybe pay them to dispose of it, I guess) and they keep the KVM, because it's theirs.
  - jiggunjer 5mo ago
    I think a raspberry pi setup would be the cheapest? Not as professional perhaps.
- simoncion 5mo ago
  > From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: Yeah. I got bored a couple of hours after I posted that speculation and found several other colo facilities that mentioned that they'd do remote KVM. I'd figured that it was a common thing (a fair chunk of hardware you might want to colo either doesn't have IPMI or doesn't have IPMI that's worth a damn), but wasn't sure.
literalAardvark 5mo ago
k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). It encourages some dumb decisions that do, such as using Prometheus stack with default settings, but by itself it just eats a lot of ram. Now using CPU limits in k8s with cgroups v1 does hurt performance. But doing that would hurt performance without k8s too.
- simoncion 5mo ago
  > k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). Sorry, what "k1s" are you referring to? The only projects with that name that I see are either cut-down management CLIs and GUIs that only work with a preexisting Kubernetes cluster, or years-old abandoned proof-of-concept/alpha-grade Kubernetes reimplementations that are completely unsuitable as a Kubernetes replacement. The only actually-functional cut-down Kubernetes I'm aware of is 'minikube'. Minikube requires -at minimum- 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. [0] That doesn't fit on either of the machines 'nrdvana' was talking about... not the "tiny ... digital ocean droplet", with its 1CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB of disk space [1], nor the "tiny linode" (which has roughly the same specs [2]). Given that it's not at all uncommon for discarded laptops to have 4 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and like 250GB of disk, eating 1/4th of the RAM, (intermittently) half of the CPU power, and roughly a tenth of the disk space just for Kubernetes housekeeping kinda sucks. That's pretty damn "heavy", in my judgment. So. Do you have a link to this 'k1s' thing you were talking about? Does it use less than 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk? [0] <https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/> [1] <https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-can-save https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-...> [2] <https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be> [3] [3] Did you know that Linode got bought by Akami? I didn't!
  - literalAardvark 5mo ago
    Sorry I meant k0s. Off by one error at 3 am. There are a couple of things here: first off, minikube isn't tuned for low resources, it's a full k8s packaged for developers. Second, it doesn't burn much CPU at all unless you blew it up and it's churning pods. Third, try to remember that you're running a tool that provides most of what you need to run a service, it's not a bare VM, it comes with reverse proxy, tons of tools, and cluster management. Basically those minimal specs let you actually run quite a lot of stuff on that minikube, they're not just for the management system. k0s needs roughly 500MB RAM and 1.5GB drive to run a controller+worker. Can probably pare k3s down to that as well. And I repeat, this gets you single pane cluster management across all your laptops, reverse proxy, DNS, resource shaping, namespaces, etc. Only big problem with it is that adding distributed storage is quite heavy and unstable (longhorn) or really heavy (ceph), so storage management might need to be manual which is a pain in k8s.

bigiain 5mo ago

> Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet That gets you, what, 1 "vCPU" with maybe a gig of ram and a couple of dozen gig of disk. If you (or a friend) work for a company of any size, there's probably a cupboard full of laptops that won't upgrade to Win11 sitting there doing nothing that you could get for free just by asking the right person. It'll have 4 or 8 cores, each of which is more powerful that the "vCPU" in that droplet. It'll have 8 or maybe 16gig of ram, and at least half a TB of disk and depending on that laptop quite likely to be able to be configured with half a TB of fast nVME storage and a few TB of slower spinning rust storage. If you want 8vCPUs/cores, 16GB of ram, and 500GB of SSD, all of a sudden Digital Ocean looks more like $250/month. If you are somewhere in that grey area where you need more than ivCPU and 1GB of memory, grabbing the laptop out of the cupboard that your PM or one of the admin staff upgraded from last year and shipping not off to a datacenter with your flavour of linux installed seems like it's worth considering. Hell, get together with a friend and have two laptops hosted for 14Euro/month between you, and be each others "failing hardware" backup plan...