alt Hacker NewsThe 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?
Replies
> Why do I need a cluster?
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 .`.
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.
if you run firecracker inside the rented cloud vm, and you let a few of them run, and perhaps interact with each other, you have essentially created a cluster of microvms that's hosted on a single machine
as argued by OP, you can see this happening with exe.dev, and less explicitly with sprites.dev
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
Isn't there a meaningful sense in which "separate VMs for different apps" constitutes a cluster?
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.
MPI is kind of fun to write.
> 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.