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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to be snarky, just a sincere question - why would you use kubernetes for something like IoT?

I attended KubeCon China last year and there was a very good example of a K8s setup for IoT that scales pretty well. Check these links if you’re curious:

- https://schd.ws/hosted_files/kccncchina2018english/18/ShengL...

- https://thenewstack.io/rancher-takes-kubernetes-management-t...

Disclaimer: not affiliated with any of the companies above. Edit: formatting.

Is there any link with the talk ?

Because I want my doors, windows, garage door, smoke alarms, security system, and any other smart thing in my house even when the IoT controller dies. I also want as much functionality as possible if my ISP (Comcast) decides on another "maintenance" window.

So that basically means local smarts and fall over in the case of a hardware failure.

Same. What does it have to do with kubernetes?

I like your username.

Well if you want a nice cheap, small cluster, with HA, and wide community support, and a container model so you have to trust the applications less. What else are you going to use? What else is going to provide a nice easy to use HA raspberry pi that's $100 ish?

Can containers really improve security in case of IoT where there's a single application that pretty much needs access to the whole device? I think they may only increase the attack surface. High availability seems like an orthogonal problem in case of IoT. It's not like you can spawn more devices. But I acknowledge that it may be just me getting old.

Still happy to learn more arguments for using k8s in IoT (if you are already using k8s then yes, seems like k3s would make sense).

IoT clients consume the entire device. Not necessarily the IoT server. k3s supports containerd on arm7 and provides good isolation. With efficient code you can easily support a web portal, a light weight database, and plenty of logic for IoT type needs. Seems ideal for trusting multiple 3rd parties, like say one company with your thermostat, one for your cameras, and a 3rd for your lights or similar.

I don't think the suggestion for Kubernetes in IoT is to run it on the Things, but for small local servers running services that work with the devices, instead of pushing all that in the cloud.

Not necessarily. I've seen some k8s on IOT industrial use cases where it made sense. Solar power stations were one example, IIRC.

Rancher Employee here: One of the use cases we have been seeing is for stores, factories, oil wells, base stations, wind farms, etc. the apps people are trying to deploy to these now look much more like data center/micro services apps. Kafka, Redis, logstash, etc. K8s is really good for running these in a reliable and consistent way on potentially divergent hardware.

https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at...

Of all things, the Chik-fil-A tech blog gives a pretty good explanation of why you might want this.

We use it to orchestrate agents, most of which, but not all, tunnel into VPN concentrators scattered across the globe to monitor and control remote devices. Admittedly ours is in the M2M IoT space for now (Digital Cinema) -- we don't deploy our own sensor network (yet) though our agent could broker that integration as well.

After toying with k8s, we realized just how much tinker time our current docker-n-script approach takes to optimize and scale optimally. We're close to moving to k8s after almost a year of on-again/off-again dev and I'm very excited to roll it out. Not as excited as DevOps, maybe, as it's going to lift a lot of weight off their shoulders.

TL;DR: IoT means different things in different industries.

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