> What's particularly fascinating to me, though, is how some people are so pro-cloud that they'd argue with a writeup like this with silly cloud talking points.
I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell for this, but I’m convinced that it’s largely their insecurities being projected.
Running your own hardware isn’t tremendously difficult, as anyone who’s done it can attest, but it does require a much deeper understanding of Linux (and of course, any services which previously would have been XaaS), and that’s a vanishing trait these days. So for someone who may well be quite skilled at K8s administration, serverless (lol) architectures, etc. it probably is seen as an affront to suggest that their skill set is lacking something fundamental.
> So for someone who may well be quite skilled at K8s administration ...
And running your own hardware is not incompatible with Kubernetes: on the contrary. You can fully well have your infra spin up VMs and then do container orchestration if that's your thing.
And part your hardware monitoring and reporting tool can work perfectly fine from containers.
Bare metal -> Hypervisor -> VM -> container orchestration -> a container running a "stateless" hardware monitoring service. And VMs themselves are "orchestrated" too. Everything can be automated.
Anyway say a harddisk being to show errors? Notifications being sent (email/SMS/Telegram/whatever) by another service in another container, dashboard shall show it too (dashboards are cool).
Go to the machine once the spare disk as already been resilvered, move it where the failed disk was, plug in a new disk that becomes the new spare.
Boom, done.
I'm not saying all self-hosted hardware should do container orchestration: there are valid use cases for bare metal too.
But something as to be said about controlling everything on your own infra: from the bare metal to the VMs to container orchestration. To even potentially your own IP address space.
This is all within reach of an individual, both skill-wise and price-wise (including obtaining your own IP address space). People who drank the cloud kool-aid should ponder this and wonder how good their skills truly are if they cannot get this up and working.
Fully agree. And if you want to take it to the next level (and have a large budget), Oxide [0] seems to have neatly packaged this into a single coherent product. They don't quite have K8s fully running, last I checked, but there are of course other container orchestration systems.
> Go to the machine once the spare disk as already been resilvered
> And running your own hardware is not incompatible with Kubernetes: on the contrary
Kubernetes actually makes so much more sense on bare-metal hardware.
On the cloud, I think the value prop is dubious - your cloud provider is already giving you VMs, why would you need to subdivide them further and add yet another layer of orchestration?
Not to mention that you're getting 2010s-era performance on those VMs, so subdividing them is terrible from a performance point of view too.
> Not to mention that you're getting 2010s-era performance on those VMs, so subdividing them is terrible from a performance point of view too.
I was trying in vain to explain to our infra team a couple of weeks ago why giving my team a dedicated node of a newer instance family with DDR5 RAM would be beneficial for an application which is heavily constrained by RAM speed. People seem to assume that compute is homogenous.
I would wager that the same kind of people that were arguing against your request for a specific hardware config are the same ones in this comment section railing against any sort of self-sufficiency by hosting it yourself on hardware. All they know is cloud, all they know how to do is "ScAlE Up thE InStanCE!" when shit hits the fan. It's difficult to argue against that and make real progress. I understand your frustration completely.
I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to hell for this, but I’m convinced that it’s largely their insecurities being projected.
Running your own hardware isn’t tremendously difficult, as anyone who’s done it can attest, but it does require a much deeper understanding of Linux (and of course, any services which previously would have been XaaS), and that’s a vanishing trait these days. So for someone who may well be quite skilled at K8s administration, serverless (lol) architectures, etc. it probably is seen as an affront to suggest that their skill set is lacking something fundamental.