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Excuse my ignorance, but in what way is this bare-metal? I've always taken that term to mean running without an operating system. My only assumption is because

by Cieric 5y ago

Excuse my ignorance, but in what way is this bare-metal? I've always taken that term to mean running without an operating system. My only assumption is because it's not run in the cloud, but I figure that would be a given since "Raspberry Pi" is in the name.

deleted 5y ago
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jacobwg 5y ago
This is "bare-metal" in the sense of "not virtualized", meaning the host operating system is not running in a virtual machine. You can see this distinction in cloud environments too, for instance most AWS EC2 machine types are virtualized, but AWS also offers "bare metal" instance types that provide direct access to a physical machine.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Many, if not most, Kubernetes systems are all running in the cloud in virtual machines or managed containers. Here, Kubernetes is running on the Pi itself, with no hypervisors or time sharing to chop away at performance. That's not to say that running k8s on bare metal isn't something that's done. It's more difficult, because you need to do a lot of configuration and verification of best practices yourself, but it can easily become the cheaper option if you have some scaling requirements but do not require the infinite scaling possibilities of the cloud. The entire industry seems to be moving back and forth between cloud and bate metal every few years and I'm not really sure in what part of this cycle we are right now (I think more and more companies are in the process of going back to bare metal? The move in the other direction could've already started, I'm not sure.) Technically you could set up a distributed hypervisor cluster consisting solely of networked Raspberry Pis, but I doubt you'd have many interested customers. So yes, "bare metal" is probably the norm for these computers. It's not for Kubernetes, though, and that's what makes this different from your typical deployment.
- thrashh 5y ago
  That’s a lot of text to say that bare metal means “no OS” to firmware engineers and “running on a dedicated system” to application engineers.

by Cieric 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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jacobwg 5y ago

This is "bare-metal" in the sense of "not virtualized", meaning the host operating system is not running in a virtual machine. You can see this distinction in cloud environments too, for instance most AWS EC2 machine types are virtualized, but AWS also offers "bare metal" instance types that provide direct access to a physical machine.

jeroenhd 5y ago

Many, if not most, Kubernetes systems are all running in the cloud in virtual machines or managed containers. Here, Kubernetes is running on the Pi itself, with no hypervisors or time sharing to chop away at performance. That's not to say that running k8s on bare metal isn't something that's done. It's more difficult, because you need to do a lot of configuration and verification of best practices yourself, but it can easily become the cheaper option if you have some scaling requirements but do not require the infinite scaling possibilities of the cloud. The entire industry seems to be moving back and forth between cloud and bate metal every few years and I'm not really sure in what part of this cycle we are right now (I think more and more companies are in the process of going back to bare metal? The move in the other direction could've already started, I'm not sure.) Technically you could set up a distributed hypervisor cluster consisting solely of networked Raspberry Pis, but I doubt you'd have many interested customers. So yes, "bare metal" is probably the norm for these computers. It's not for Kubernetes, though, and that's what makes this different from your typical deployment.

thrashh 5y ago
That’s a lot of text to say that bare metal means “no OS” to firmware engineers and “running on a dedicated system” to application engineers.