8 ms·

Minecraft as a Kubernetes admin tool

419 points by JordanTen 5y ago

WelcomeShorty 5y ago
20 years ago I pitched something like this, but based on network traffic (shaping with routers, switches & fws) managed in a 3D world. My presentation skills suck, so it never got off the ground but I still visualise network traffic in my head that way. Would still love to roam around in networks and enjoy the graphics.
pugworthy 5y ago
Very much like using Doom for process management. See this 2001 ACM SIGCHI article -> https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
- devindotcom 5y ago
  Beat me to it by seconds... I was immediately reminded of that.
- crb 5y ago
  These two worlds have already collided: https://github.com/storax/kubedoom https://github.com/storax/kubedoom
- Laremere 5y ago
  See also: https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ "Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted."
  - geek_at 5y ago
    > See also: https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ > "Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted." That's awesome! Reminds me of a little virtual tamagochi I programmed in college called Virus. Virus would only represent itself as a file called for example Toby.virus and it would wander around in folders (only 2 levels deep) and you could give him ascii files with a ".food" extension that includes strings and depending on the size of the file the virus would get full. If too full it would lave ".puke" files with some of the strings from the food file. And otherwise randomly leave ".poop" files around you'd have to clean up to make virus stay healthy. You could see its stats in the ".virus" file. I even implemented mating and light genetic traits that can be passed down Good times
    - comradesmith 5y ago
      That sounds like a lot of fun to write! Do you still have the code for that?
      - seanw444 5y ago
        I too am very interested in messing around with this. Very cool idea.
        geek_at 5y ago
        sadly I don't have the code anymore but re-writing VIRUS is pretty high on my "some day" bucket list ;)
    - atsushin 5y ago
      I actually have a similar idea, at least the Tamagotchi part of it. Now that I've read your comment I feel more motivated to actually flesh it out and implement it, lol.
      - geek_at 5y ago
        great, looking forward to seeing it on hn ;D
- framecowbird 5y ago
  " A significant problem with the current implementation of PSDoom is that monsters are much more likely to attack each other than expected. This causes many windows to mysteriously disappear as the program runs" Brilliant
aahortwwy 5y ago
What an interesting idea. Would this work in multiplayer? I've worked at a few companies that loved SlackOps, but MinecraftOps seems a lot more fun...
- kroltan 5y ago
  Minecraft is an intrinsically multiplayer game (singleplayer mode just spins a local server and connects to it) so yes it would. Regarding the plugin, there might be a need to detect the user that kills the chickens for auditing purposes, but the basic idea should work fine yeah.
- darknavi 5y ago
  In this case it is using the websocket support for Minecraft (Bedrock) which _should_ work for headless servers.
sockpuppet_12 5y ago
What a time to be alive!
zekrioca 5y ago
(2020)
pm90 5y ago
I love this. In the Future, I imagine complex computer systems will likely be represented in forms humans find engaging rather than having humans learn the intricacies of computers; this would open up the field to a lot more people (analogous to the No code movement… and would suffer similar pitfalls).
- skripp 5y ago
  "It's UNIX system. I know this."
- excalibur 5y ago
  This was always my theory about why Microsoft bought Minecraft in the first place, to train the workforce of the future and own the tools that would become standard. Who doesn't want to do data mining with a pickaxe?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- maxbond 5y ago
  I disagree. I think good interfaces wrap these intricacies in powerful metaphors that build a bridge between the human and the computer, and that it is right and proper that the human meets the computer more than halfway. I think things like desktops and video games as admin tools* are poor user interfaces because they present poor metaphors for how work is done or how concepts are arranged, instead of good metaphors for computation. This creates brittle interfaces that are difficult to learn and troubleshoot because I think the terminal is an antiqutated interface that needs to be modernized, but there's a good reason it's still used. Bash is a pretty reasonably metaphor for computation. When things go wrong with your computer, you're better able to reach into it's guts, hear the hum of it's engine, and figure out what's wrong. As I said, it's antiquated and hostile to newcomers, so ultimately it isn't that good an interface. But there is no ceiling for how well you can master it or what you can do with it. Contrast that with a desktop interface, where if things go wrong, your only option is to muck about in a settings application. If your needs have been correctly anticipated, this works like butter, with very little friction. If your needs have been incorrectly anticipated, it works okay, but is probably frustrating. If your needs have not been anticipated at all, you may be able to find a workaround, but only if you have a high degree of mastery in the interface. And you may be out of luck. Additionally, achieving this high degree of mastery is difficult and not generally worthwhile, because these interfaces are subject to frequent changes. You don't accrue more and more skill over time throughout your career, unless you happen to work in this industry or are a motivated power user. And as you upgrade your OS, things are moved around and tweaked, and your mastery degrades. I realized this was the case when my hands were injured for 10 months from typing, and I could only compute on my phone. I couldn't make anything, I could only browse premade apps and pray my needs had been anticipated. I couldn't fix anything, my only path to getting useful debugging information involved a computer. I was frustrated and felt like I didn't understand what my phone was doing or why it wasn't working. And I realized that is how most people feel about their computers. * I do realize these are fun toys/proofs of concept, and I totally appreciate them on that level.
indigochill 5y ago
Awesome, now the next time my tech director tells me services are cattle, I can tell him, "Actually, sir, they're chickens." Love it.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  So a DDoS attack is like a horde of skeletons?
beckingz 5y ago
Using the animals as kubernetes resources is great: cattle not pets.
brundolf 5y ago
Taking "cattle not pets" to a whole new level
nodesocket 5y ago
When they killed a pig and it killed the pod, how was that accomplished in Kubernetes? Did not change the number of replicas for hello-world. I'm guessing the server called into the pod and gave it a exit command/signal.
- thamer 5y ago
  Likely just `kubectl delete pod $pod_name`.
  - nodesocket 5y ago
    Ahh duhhh, completely overthinking it.
schmichael 5y ago
The Nomad version: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/hashicorp-nomad-explained-via-minecraft https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/hashicorp-nomad-explaine... https://youtu.be/GBnb5x1kKg8 https://youtu.be/GBnb5x1kKg8
lazyant 5y ago
See also managing k8s by excel https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl
safetytrick 5y ago
This would be a really fun way to implement a "chaos monkey".
- throwJan22 5y ago
  Creepers randomly blowing up stuff lol.
  - aspyct 5y ago
    Ahahaha that would be brilliant :D
- zamalek 5y ago
  Jest let your kids and their friends old have at the world.
chaostheory 5y ago
Maybe you can pair this with ViveCraft? Java Minecraft VR http://www.vivecraft.org/ http://www.vivecraft.org/
mdaniel 5y ago
The non-medium.com link, for those into such things: https://github.com/erjadi/kubecraftadmin https://github.com/erjadi/kubecraftadmin
- boogies 5y ago
  And a mirror of the medium.com blog with prefers-colorscheme: dark CSS and not JavaScript: https://scribe.rip/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-cf16f890de42 https://scribe.rip/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-cf16f890de4...
asicsp 5y ago
See also: DevOps Through Minecraft (work-in-progress) https://blog.kywa.io/mineops-intro/ https://blog.kywa.io/mineops-intro/
rlyshw 5y ago
Ha, this is great. I just spent the holiday break launching a kubernetes cluster in my home lab, on which I’ve deployed a Minecraft server to play with my friends. I guess with this I could manage my Minecraft kubernetes deployment WITHIN the world itself. One creeper and the whole server comes crumbling down. It would be a very risky game.
kitd 5y ago
A colleague of mine once wrote a Websphere AS console app as a Minecraft mod. Little buttons and levers and dials to control stuff. V cool. This looks similar.
mrmattyboy 5y ago
I love this on so many levels.. going back 5/10 years (or at least pre-cloud) when you'd have a bunch of long-lived servers, each named, each with it's own quirks etc. and would begin to have their own personalality. Then the 'cloud' came along and blew all that away with autoscaling and completely non-persistence of machines... this _really_ captures it in my eyes, where we're now managing large farms of desposable infrastructure. It shows the idea of culling large amounts of it and scaling, but still brings back the 'personal' feel that the servers are living things with feelings (｡◕‿◕｡). Also, throwJan22's creeper idea for chaos monkey implementation is fantastic (and I guess not a particuarly hard thing to implement at this point :P ) If you could break the fences between the namespaces and just blow open any network policies between them would be great :D
stunt 5y ago
This is a great way to incentivise people to work outside of business hours.
InvOfSmallC 5y ago
Oh man, I don't want to be the guy on call during Creeper's time!
tiku 5y ago
Couple it with crypto rewards for managing other peoples servers (just make sure it's redundant so that 2 or 3 actions = consensus haha) Real life farming for money!
veltas 5y ago
Would actually be fun to work from inside the Minecraft client all day, get bored and you can take a quick break to go build something. Spend the rest of day at something like a ComputerCraft terminal, make notes in-game. Sounds really fun in my head but would probably get bored really quickly.
mirages 5y ago
Gives a new meaning to set production in fire
pxf 5y ago
so this is the metaverse... ok
shog_hn 5y ago
I did something similar when I made kube-chaos: https://www.shogan.co.uk/kubernetes/i-made-a-kubernetes-game-where-you-explore-your-cluster-and-destroy-pods/ https://www.shogan.co.uk/kubernetes/i-made-a-kubernetes-game... It is an original game (twin stick shmup) made in Unity that is able to connect to a kubernetes cluster. You 'enter' into your nodes and the pods running on those nodes appear in that 'world' where you are able to shoot and destroy them. Replica Sets will of course re-create them, so they respawn and float around again.
JordanTen 5y ago
https://kubelist.com/ https://kubelist.com/ is where I found this in case anyone wants to take a look

419 points by JordanTen 5y ago

20 years ago I pitched something like this, but based on network traffic (shaping with routers, switches & fws) managed in a 3D world. My presentation skills suck, so it never got off the ground but I still visualise network traffic in my head that way. Would still love to roam around in networks and enjoy the graphics.

pugworthy 5y ago

Very much like using Doom for process management. See this 2001 ACM SIGCHI article -> https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

devindotcom 5y ago
Beat me to it by seconds... I was immediately reminded of that.
crb 5y ago
These two worlds have already collided: https://github.com/storax/kubedoom https://github.com/storax/kubedoom
Laremere 5y ago
See also: https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ "Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted."
- geek_at 5y ago
  > See also: https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ https://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/ > "Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted." That's awesome! Reminds me of a little virtual tamagochi I programmed in college called Virus. Virus would only represent itself as a file called for example Toby.virus and it would wander around in folders (only 2 levels deep) and you could give him ascii files with a ".food" extension that includes strings and depending on the size of the file the virus would get full. If too full it would lave ".puke" files with some of the strings from the food file. And otherwise randomly leave ".poop" files around you'd have to clean up to make virus stay healthy. You could see its stats in the ".virus" file. I even implemented mating and light genetic traits that can be passed down Good times
  - comradesmith 5y ago
    That sounds like a lot of fun to write! Do you still have the code for that?
    - seanw444 5y ago
      I too am very interested in messing around with this. Very cool idea.
      - geek_at 5y ago
        sadly I don't have the code anymore but re-writing VIRUS is pretty high on my "some day" bucket list ;)
  - atsushin 5y ago
    I actually have a similar idea, at least the Tamagotchi part of it. Now that I've read your comment I feel more motivated to actually flesh it out and implement it, lol.
    - geek_at 5y ago
      great, looking forward to seeing it on hn ;D
framecowbird 5y ago
" A significant problem with the current implementation of PSDoom is that monsters are much more likely to attack each other than expected. This causes many windows to mysteriously disappear as the program runs" Brilliant

aahortwwy 5y ago

What an interesting idea. Would this work in multiplayer? I've worked at a few companies that loved SlackOps, but MinecraftOps seems a lot more fun...

kroltan 5y ago
Minecraft is an intrinsically multiplayer game (singleplayer mode just spins a local server and connects to it) so yes it would. Regarding the plugin, there might be a need to detect the user that kills the chickens for auditing purposes, but the basic idea should work fine yeah.
darknavi 5y ago
In this case it is using the websocket support for Minecraft (Bedrock) which _should_ work for headless servers.

sockpuppet_12 5y ago

What a time to be alive!

zekrioca 5y ago

(2020)

pm90 5y ago

I love this. In the Future, I imagine complex computer systems will likely be represented in forms humans find engaging rather than having humans learn the intricacies of computers; this would open up the field to a lot more people (analogous to the No code movement… and would suffer similar pitfalls).

skripp 5y ago
"It's UNIX system. I know this."
excalibur 5y ago
This was always my theory about why Microsoft bought Minecraft in the first place, to train the workforce of the future and own the tools that would become standard. Who doesn't want to do data mining with a pickaxe?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
maxbond 5y ago
I disagree. I think good interfaces wrap these intricacies in powerful metaphors that build a bridge between the human and the computer, and that it is right and proper that the human meets the computer more than halfway. I think things like desktops and video games as admin tools* are poor user interfaces because they present poor metaphors for how work is done or how concepts are arranged, instead of good metaphors for computation. This creates brittle interfaces that are difficult to learn and troubleshoot because I think the terminal is an antiqutated interface that needs to be modernized, but there's a good reason it's still used. Bash is a pretty reasonably metaphor for computation. When things go wrong with your computer, you're better able to reach into it's guts, hear the hum of it's engine, and figure out what's wrong. As I said, it's antiquated and hostile to newcomers, so ultimately it isn't that good an interface. But there is no ceiling for how well you can master it or what you can do with it. Contrast that with a desktop interface, where if things go wrong, your only option is to muck about in a settings application. If your needs have been correctly anticipated, this works like butter, with very little friction. If your needs have been incorrectly anticipated, it works okay, but is probably frustrating. If your needs have not been anticipated at all, you may be able to find a workaround, but only if you have a high degree of mastery in the interface. And you may be out of luck. Additionally, achieving this high degree of mastery is difficult and not generally worthwhile, because these interfaces are subject to frequent changes. You don't accrue more and more skill over time throughout your career, unless you happen to work in this industry or are a motivated power user. And as you upgrade your OS, things are moved around and tweaked, and your mastery degrades. I realized this was the case when my hands were injured for 10 months from typing, and I could only compute on my phone. I couldn't make anything, I could only browse premade apps and pray my needs had been anticipated. I couldn't fix anything, my only path to getting useful debugging information involved a computer. I was frustrated and felt like I didn't understand what my phone was doing or why it wasn't working. And I realized that is how most people feel about their computers. * I do realize these are fun toys/proofs of concept, and I totally appreciate them on that level.

indigochill 5y ago

Awesome, now the next time my tech director tells me services are cattle, I can tell him, "Actually, sir, they're chickens." Love it.

moffkalast 5y ago
So a DDoS attack is like a horde of skeletons?

beckingz 5y ago

Using the animals as kubernetes resources is great: cattle not pets.

brundolf 5y ago

Taking "cattle not pets" to a whole new level

nodesocket 5y ago

When they killed a pig and it killed the pod, how was that accomplished in Kubernetes? Did not change the number of replicas for hello-world. I'm guessing the server called into the pod and gave it a exit command/signal.

thamer 5y ago
Likely just `kubectl delete pod $pod_name`.
- nodesocket 5y ago
  Ahh duhhh, completely overthinking it.

schmichael 5y ago

The Nomad version: https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/hashicorp-nomad-explained-via-minecraft https://www.hashicorp.com/resources/hashicorp-nomad-explaine... https://youtu.be/GBnb5x1kKg8 https://youtu.be/GBnb5x1kKg8

lazyant 5y ago

See also managing k8s by excel https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl

safetytrick 5y ago

This would be a really fun way to implement a "chaos monkey".

throwJan22 5y ago
Creepers randomly blowing up stuff lol.
- aspyct 5y ago
  Ahahaha that would be brilliant :D
zamalek 5y ago
Jest let your kids and their friends old have at the world.

chaostheory 5y ago

Maybe you can pair this with ViveCraft? Java Minecraft VR http://www.vivecraft.org/ http://www.vivecraft.org/

mdaniel 5y ago

The non-medium.com link, for those into such things: https://github.com/erjadi/kubecraftadmin https://github.com/erjadi/kubecraftadmin

boogies 5y ago
And a mirror of the medium.com blog with prefers-colorscheme: dark CSS and not JavaScript: https://scribe.rip/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-cf16f890de42 https://scribe.rip/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-cf16f890de4...

asicsp 5y ago

See also: DevOps Through Minecraft (work-in-progress) https://blog.kywa.io/mineops-intro/ https://blog.kywa.io/mineops-intro/

rlyshw 5y ago

Ha, this is great. I just spent the holiday break launching a kubernetes cluster in my home lab, on which I’ve deployed a Minecraft server to play with my friends. I guess with this I could manage my Minecraft kubernetes deployment WITHIN the world itself. One creeper and the whole server comes crumbling down. It would be a very risky game.

kitd 5y ago

A colleague of mine once wrote a Websphere AS console app as a Minecraft mod. Little buttons and levers and dials to control stuff. V cool. This looks similar.

mrmattyboy 5y ago

I love this on so many levels.. going back 5/10 years (or at least pre-cloud) when you'd have a bunch of long-lived servers, each named, each with it's own quirks etc. and would begin to have their own personalality. Then the 'cloud' came along and blew all that away with autoscaling and completely non-persistence of machines... this _really_ captures it in my eyes, where we're now managing large farms of desposable infrastructure. It shows the idea of culling large amounts of it and scaling, but still brings back the 'personal' feel that the servers are living things with feelings (｡◕‿◕｡). Also, throwJan22's creeper idea for chaos monkey implementation is fantastic (and I guess not a particuarly hard thing to implement at this point :P ) If you could break the fences between the namespaces and just blow open any network policies between them would be great :D

stunt 5y ago

This is a great way to incentivise people to work outside of business hours.

InvOfSmallC 5y ago

Oh man, I don't want to be the guy on call during Creeper's time!

tiku 5y ago

Couple it with crypto rewards for managing other peoples servers (just make sure it's redundant so that 2 or 3 actions = consensus haha) Real life farming for money!

veltas 5y ago

Would actually be fun to work from inside the Minecraft client all day, get bored and you can take a quick break to go build something. Spend the rest of day at something like a ComputerCraft terminal, make notes in-game. Sounds really fun in my head but would probably get bored really quickly.

mirages 5y ago

Gives a new meaning to set production in fire

pxf 5y ago

so this is the metaverse... ok

shog_hn 5y ago

I did something similar when I made kube-chaos: https://www.shogan.co.uk/kubernetes/i-made-a-kubernetes-game-where-you-explore-your-cluster-and-destroy-pods/ https://www.shogan.co.uk/kubernetes/i-made-a-kubernetes-game... It is an original game (twin stick shmup) made in Unity that is able to connect to a kubernetes cluster. You 'enter' into your nodes and the pods running on those nodes appear in that 'world' where you are able to shoot and destroy them. Replica Sets will of course re-create them, so they respawn and float around again.

JordanTen 5y ago

https://kubelist.com/ https://kubelist.com/ is where I found this in case anyone wants to take a look