Do you think kubernetes are necessary for small businesses?
Pretty much any business will want inventory tracking, tracking staff hours, monitoring cameras, sensors for detecting flooding/doors left open/freezers dying, running point of sales terminals, keeping the supply chain running smoothly, handling customer loyalty cards, handling returns, etc.
An on site cluster can help with much of that, even if there's a hardware failure or the network is out.
Question is how will these business find the apps they need that run turn key on some small k8s cluster?
The obstacle to using custom hardware and software in local biz is and has always been, the fact that by relying on it, the one guy who knows how to administer it all becomes the single point of failure for the whole business.
No amount of tooling can save them from that. So local biz will always be beholden to the Oracles of the world, because smart individuals just can't be relied on.
Businesses need to rely on other businesses. A business with a customer service departments and spare stock on hand. K3s or k8s might be used in the technology product offered by such a business, but this by itself won't change the economics of that market.
Seems like there's an opportunity for a cheap 3 node cluster, sold as a value add to businesses and supported a platform that application writers could target. They might well come with a support contract, some basic functionality, and then users could pay for inventory, staff scheduling, point of sales terminal support, integration with food delivery services, etc.
Much like how some home/small business NASs these days have support for 100s of integrations to various online services.
I'm not thinking cluster for performance, just for HA.
For small business why not 3 x Raspberry Pi to enable as much functionality as possible without network and/or power? A cheap UPS would likely run a few Pi for days. Chick-fil-a (3 NUC in a k8s cluster) seems pretty proud of their setup, why not something similar for any similar size restaurant? 3x Pi for smaller businesses seems like a good fit.
Oh, and a Pi cluster isn't going to need any more AC than a human, even if it's uncomfortable. I have one in my attic and it regularly gets above 110 in the summer, no problems so far.
If the network is out, have the Pi fall over to WAN, this is pretty common these days. Some consumer routers support this (insert a sim car), and it's fairly common for raspberry Pis used for home security to support similar. Handling credit card transactions over WAN is reasonably practical... even falling over to a modem+POTS could do for an emergency.
So between UPS (even UPS + solar + battery would be reasonable for a Pi) and fallover to WAN or modem a 3 way cluster could help keep business up during power outages, storms, earthquakes, fires, and of course node failures.
Question is can the right combination of hardware standardization, software standardization, support, and application store get together to enable chick-fil-a like functionality at a price point acceptable to small businesses?
First of all, do you know what k8s is for? Bin packing. Does your small business have a bin packing problem? (And I don't mean crates) Does your small business even need containers at all?
Second, 3 nodes is more than you need. You only need 2 nodes for HA. There is no universe in which two nodes in the closet of a coffee shop would go down, but three would not.
Third, it's too complicated. It takes teams of people loads of time and money to get it working properly, and then they have to keep supporting it, because release cycles and changing standards, etc. Distributed systems are the most complex and the most costly, unless you're at a huge scale, and then it can be cheaper.
Four, it's unnecessarily expensive, because again, you don't need 3, and it's too complicated.
Five, you don't need 3 nodes to have redundant network paths. A DSL line and a cell modem are pretty easy to plug into one machine.
But six, the real reason this wouldn't work: small businesses do not buy HA.
> Question is can the right combination of hardware standardization, software standardization, support, and application store get together to enable chick-fil-a like functionality at a price point acceptable to small businesses?
Yes, it's called Windows on a Dell.
Docker is on my long term list (maybe) but the current system is fast, stable and requires little intervention so docker would have to offer a massive change not a step change to make it worth it.
I always default to things I know until the benefits are clear and it's worked out well so far.
Just to give more context, our use case is spawning Jupyter notebook in containers using JupyterHub and DockerSpawner so that each data scientist gets a personal ready-to-use environment to work with. With 4 data scientists we're beginning to reach the limits of the largest instance provided by our cloud provider and we're expecting to have more users soon. Actually our current cloud provider has just released a managed k8s service so that might be the way to go.
I highly recommend leveraging AWS, Google, Azure, etc services. Especially if you're a small business, spending a little for off the shelf tools that someone else operates and supports is going to help you big time.
Perhaps you'd be better served using more managed services, though?
Kubernetes is only relevant if you have the need to scale your service quickly and/or often. If you run it on your own hardware the value is even more tricky to work out, it can still be a benefit. Whether or not it help you save on hardware cost is extremely dependent on your usage.
- Rolling update? Build it yourself or get it with k8s - Infrastructure as code? Do it somehow yourself with ansible, awx or other setup OR just use k8s - Running different workloads on a bunch of hardware with resource scheduler -> some trickery or x different kind of vms
I like it very much and i hope and guess that the k8s way will take over a lot. And since i'm working with k8s i really wanna have it at home. k3s sounds like a very good way forward.
If you have a good working little setup, you don't need to replace it with k8s.