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?
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.
https://commaok.xyz/ai/just-in-time-software/
I mean, I don't do that, but I'll type a prompt.
let me draw this out the way i've been playing with:
a classic vm exists, and supports kvm — this means you can run stuff like firecracker in there
an ssh server runs on this vm, and when you connect to it, you're dropped into a repl/tui where you can list existing microvms, create new ones, or destroy existing ones, and, of particular use, you can attach to one.
as an added nicety, if you connect with `ssh user+dev@example.com`, your connection skips the management interface and you are dropped into the `dev` machine — if it didn't yet exist, you wait 3s, and now it does
vms can talk to each other internally, can connect out, and persist if the server needs a restart
what i don't have yet is proper multi-tenancy, it treats each ssh key as an account, which is fine since it's just me; incoming connections is not figured out, internal supervisor to keep services running inside each microvm, isolation inside firecracker, snapshoting or backups, and the whole shopping list that would make it an actual mvp
I have run Linux laptops before. After running it for five years, I came to the conclusion that it did not make a good laptop for my use-case. Poor suspend-resume support, poor wireless networking support means I can not just pick and go. (And no one has yet to replicate Apple’s trackpad experience). So yes, I run Apple laptop with MacOS and use my TUI tools, sometimes with Linux running in an VM, sometime remotely to a full headless VM with my full dev suite via mosh because I use cli and TUI for dev.
Your turn. You still have not defined “poor man’s Linux”.
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
I run a single-node K8s cluster on a dedicated server because it's way cleaner to manage than the previous mess and mix of docker compose + traefik routing + random stuff installed as package on the host.
I can create "vhosts" for practically anything in a declarative manner, and if the cluster blows up, I have 5 small scripts to bootstrap it and all I need is `kubectl apply -k .`.
Usually it's rather unlike a sane dev setup. Even if your prod setup uses hundreds microservices (you're Google or Uber or something like that), you don't want to run all of them in your personal dev environment, you reuse 90%-99% of stable microservices running in the QA / integration / whatnot environment, and only run a handful locally.
Or maybe you want to run stuffz on 1000 x Raspberry Pi just for fun.
The "cooperative task" they're engaged in is just, broadly, meeting your needs, whatever they are.
The isolation is a desirable property, and I agree this is much preferable to a highly inter-coupled bunch of machines, and also that thia stretches the typical sense in which we refer to a "compute cluster", but I don't think it's an entirely invalid framing of the term.
Not really. In my experience clustering implies multiple compute elements serving the same function with a coordination mechanism to provide redundancy and/or enhanced capacity.
JBOD vs. RAID.
as argued by OP, you can see this happening with exe.dev, and less explicitly with sprites.dev