Clusters become personal (like PCs did)

(aranya.tech)

26 points | by druid 3 days ago

8 comments

  • skybrian 1 hour ago
    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?
    • Grimburger 14 minutes ago
      > 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.

    • juvoly 1 hour ago
      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.
    • tuvix 1 hour ago
      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

  • MobiusHorizons 1 hour ago
    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.
  • aliasxneo 54 minutes ago
    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.
    • cedws 33 minutes ago
      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.
  • Ancapistani 46 minutes ago
    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.

  • wrs 1 hour ago
    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?
  • gizajob 22 minutes ago
    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
  • DeathArrow 36 minutes ago
    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.

    • wmf 19 minutes ago
      Check out Plan 9 and Mosix. They weren't super fast but they worked.
  • lowbloodsugar 1 hour ago
    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!