10 ms·

MicroShift

123 points by wallflower 5y ago

erulabs 5y ago
It' so excellent to see more "tiny" distros for Kubernetes. The resource requirements of the control plane has plummeted lately, and it'll be exciting to see more IoT devices running the full k8s api. At any rate, we have a couple customers using microshift at https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com and it works like a charm for home-hosting! Might have to add docs for it soon!
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
- windexh8er 5y ago
  I'm curious what you see the most widely used as alternative distros? Also Kubesail is awesome, look to be leveraging it more this year.
  - erulabs 5y ago
    It used to be microk8s by a long shot, but starting about 6 to 12 months ago k3s has leaped head in terms of simplicity and memory/cpu usage. k3s runs great now on a system with as little as 1 or 2gb or RAM.
latchkey 5y ago
> Functionally, MicroShift repackages OpenShift core components* into a single binary that weighs in at a relatively tiny 160MB executable (without any compression/optimization). Sorry, 160meg isn't 'relatively tiny'. I have many thousands of machines running in multiple datacenters and even getting a ~4mb binary distributed onto them without saturating the network (100mbit) and slowing everything else down, is a bit of a challenge. Edit: It was just over 4mb using .gz and I recently changed to use xz, which decreased the size by about 1mb and I was excited about that given the scale that I operate at.
- dralley 5y ago
  Relative to Kubernetes (well, specifically OpenShift, which is Kubernetes packaged with a lot of commonly-needed extra functionality / tools) A "hello world" written in Go is 2mb to begin with so ~4mb is a bit unrealistic for any substantial piece of software written in Go. Although if that colors your opinion of Go itself, you're certainly allowed to have that opinion :)
  - latchkey 5y ago
    Your logic doesn't work because adding functionality doesn't necessary translate to a huge increase in binary size. The complex app (15k lines of code) that is distributed to these machines, written in Go, is just over 3mb compressed with xz. Plus this is still many orders of magnitude off with trying to get 160mb off to mobile devices per the image in the article. It is a non-starter.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dralley 5y ago
      I'm going to take a guess that even a "mini" distribution of Kubernetes is more than 15k lines of code though. k3s is quite a bit smaller than this but it's still only described as "<50 megabytes"
      - latchkey 5y ago
        I'm not sure the point of your argument. Somehow we should just accept 160meg downloads to a phone, because why?
        dralley 5y ago
        I don't understand the point of your argument, because nobody (including the announcement above) is talking about phones. From the post: > Imagine one of these small devices located in a vehicle to run AI algorithms for autonomous driving, or being able to monitor oil and gas plants in remote locations to perform predictive maintenance, or running workloads in a satellite as you would do in your own laptop. Now contrast this to centralized, highly controlled data centers where power and network conditions are usually very stable thanks to high available infrastructure — this is one of the key differences that define edge environments. > Field-deployed devices are often Single Board Computers (SBCs) chosen based on performance-to-energy/cost ratio, usually with lower-end memory and CPU options. These devices are centrally imaged by the manufacturer or the end user’s central IT before getting shipped to remote sites such as roof-top cabinets housing 5G antennas, manufacturing plants, etc. > At the remote site, a technician will screw the device to the wall, plug the power and the network cables and the work is done. Provisioning of these devices is “plug & go” with no console, keyboard or qualified personnel. In addition, these systems lack out-of-band management controllers so the provisioning model totally differs from those that we use with regular full-size servers. I don't read this and think "phones". This sounds like it's targeted at embedded industrial / telecom devices. (At least based on the examples they chose, I'm sure you could use it for other things). The word "mobile" doesn't actually appear anywhere on the page so I'm not sure where you got "mobile devices" from.
speedgoose 5y ago
Using advanced devops tools for IoT is always interesting. I have seen a few demos that were variations of the following comic : https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/26/the-internet-of-things-a-revolution/ https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/26/the-internet-of-th... One demo using Microsoft Azure IoT hub, docker, digital twins (a glorified json from memory), and a raspberry pi was fun because it took minutes to deploy something to make a light blink.
candiddevmike 5y ago
It's getting harder and harder to find the kubernetes part of openshift--wtf is openshift-dns? I'm not sold that this is better than k3s, and I think red hat isn't capable of balancing the needs of both a sprawling borg-like platform that assimilates all kube functions vs a lean kube experience.
- nullify88 5y ago
  Openshift-dns is just their custom operator which deploys and configures CoreDNS. OpenShift is k8s with alot of RH operators bundled in to configure stuff like monitoring, logging, networking, ingress, etc.
- BossingAround 5y ago
  > wtf is openshift-dns I think one thing I'm definitely missing from the OpenShift docs [1] is reasoning. What does it add? Why do I want to learn to use an operator instead? Otherwise, it's pretty clear that it's just an operator on top of CoreDNS. I do think that the docs are utterly devoid of Kubernetes content. I think historically, RH tried to differentiate themselves from K8s. Now, it can definitely hurt the knowledge migration and transfer. [1] https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.8/networking/dns-operator.html https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.8/networking...
  - freedomben 5y ago
    I can't speak for Red Hat but I have a lot of experience with OpenShift. Basically all of these operators are there to allow customization. The philosophy behind OpenShift is to move everything possible to operators so they can be managed in a cloud native way. This has a bunch of benefits like being fully declarative, and able to keep your whole config in version control.
- freedomben 5y ago
  Red Hat is definitely not going for a "lean" kube experience. OpenShift is heavy AF (for good reasons but still). They're going for "this includes everything you need for a full platform." For users that are openshift on the backend it's pretty nice to have uniformity with the edge too. This will be "light enough" for most cases although of course it can be further improved.
blinkingled 5y ago
I don't see any reason to bring the IoT buzzword into this - but I am not a marketing guy. Standard OpenShift (Ok, I will try to refrain from profanity) is extremely resource intensive even for most fat enterprise environments. They could have just one product based off of what they are calling MicroShift - less resource usage, modular to the core so customers can add precisely what they need - some will use the IoT profile, some will use minimal-enterprise and so on. Right now they just try to smother you with lot of baggage and burden and their solution to everything is run a managed one in AWS - i.e. dictate the choices. I just never liked the idea of taking something like open source k8s and creating a Redhat specific version that requires different treatment and whole lot of other enterprise stuff including RHEL. And it doesn't work all that better than GKE or EKS or even building your own cluster (I have done all 3.) They should have just created tooling around standard K8s and allowed customers to use the good parts - deployment workflows, s2i etc. basically plugging the gaps on top of standard k8s. I can totally see lot of customers seeing value in that.
- hosteur 5y ago
  That would be a much better product for the users. But not for the business. Less vendor lock-in.
  - aspenmayer 5y ago
    Better still for the business to make a product that people use!
- nullify88 5y ago
  I'm running both OpenShift and k3s in production, and there isnt that much that requires different treatment between the two. There are some specific OpenShift APIs (like routes which are terrible) and some quality of life improvements (service-ca signer) but nothing drastic.
  - blinkingled 5y ago
    Have you tried running istio for example in an enterprise env - they needed you to install a RH specific older version and IIRC that wasn't just for support. I could list some more things if I recalled hard enough.
m3adow 5y ago
Will this be availabe as Open Source version (MicroOKD?) as well? I don't see it mentioned in the blog post. I'd love to see how the resource consumption compares to k3s.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I'm sure it will. It's more a question "when" than "if."
- cpitman 5y ago
  This is an open source project from the start (as most things red hat creates), you can find the coffee here: https://github.com/redhat-et/microshift https://github.com/redhat-et/microshift
asim 5y ago
Is this anything like the canonical distribution called microk8s? https://microk8s.io/ https://microk8s.io/ On the naming front, why is everyone calling it MicroX. There can be only one Micro. https://micro.dev https://micro.dev
- BossingAround 5y ago
  > why is everyone calling it MicroX Probably because "micro" means "small" in Greek, and the whole Kubernetes uses Greek. > There can be only one Micro. https://micro.dev https://micro.dev Call me grumpy, but I spent 5 minutes on the site and still have no idea what "micro.dev" is other than "a platform for cloud-native development" (yeah, what isn't nowadays?)
seeekr 5y ago
Red Hat's answer to (now SuSe's) k3s?
tremon 5y ago
I understand where the name is coming from, but Microshift is treading dangerously close to certain other company's name and trademarks. What are the chances Microsoft will see this as trademark infringement?
- ww520 5y ago
  Whatever happened to the Michaelsoft case?
acbdgx 5y ago
jamesy0ung 5y ago
This vs k3s?
bbarn 5y ago
Probably should have done some digging before trying to coin a new name. Microshift is a huge chinese company making bicycle parts for over a decade.
- tomcam 5y ago
- mxuribe 5y ago
  I wonder if maybe they could have gone with OpenMicro instead? I don't really dislike Microsift that much but my brain did immediately auto-insert the ending of "Micro"...with ...soft. So, there's that prejudice right there. ;-)
- sfjailbird 5y ago
  There was already a 'MiniShift' version of OpenShift, so the name makes some sense. Not that RedHat has been consistent with naming this product generally, what with RedShift, OKD, OpenShift, etc.
kristianpaul 5y ago
I keep saying Microchip instead
SeanLuke 5y ago
It's worth mentioning that MicroSHIFT is a large Taiwanese bicycle components manufacturer. It's unlikely there's a trademark infringement issue as they're in different markets, but this is kind of like a bike company naming its new product "Hewlett-Packard".
- zucker42 5y ago
  It would be if Hewlett and Packard were common English words.
  - SeanLuke 5y ago
    All right. How about "MicroSoft".
    - kitchi 5y ago
      I could see a socks or underwear manufacturer called MicroSoft. Aren't trademarks domain specific anyway? Unless Nadella suddenly decides to branch into fashion of course.
dopp0 5y ago
That would be a wonderful name for Microsoft back in the day. maybe some extra letter there, but that's fine

123 points by wallflower 5y ago

It' so excellent to see more "tiny" distros for Kubernetes. The resource requirements of the control plane has plummeted lately, and it'll be exciting to see more IoT devices running the full k8s api. At any rate, we have a couple customers using microshift at https://kubesail.com https://kubesail.com and it works like a charm for home-hosting! Might have to add docs for it soon!

MrStonedOne 5y ago
windexh8er 5y ago
I'm curious what you see the most widely used as alternative distros? Also Kubesail is awesome, look to be leveraging it more this year.
- erulabs 5y ago
  It used to be microk8s by a long shot, but starting about 6 to 12 months ago k3s has leaped head in terms of simplicity and memory/cpu usage. k3s runs great now on a system with as little as 1 or 2gb or RAM.

latchkey 5y ago

> Functionally, MicroShift repackages OpenShift core components* into a single binary that weighs in at a relatively tiny 160MB executable (without any compression/optimization). Sorry, 160meg isn't 'relatively tiny'. I have many thousands of machines running in multiple datacenters and even getting a ~4mb binary distributed onto them without saturating the network (100mbit) and slowing everything else down, is a bit of a challenge. Edit: It was just over 4mb using .gz and I recently changed to use xz, which decreased the size by about 1mb and I was excited about that given the scale that I operate at.

dralley 5y ago
Relative to Kubernetes (well, specifically OpenShift, which is Kubernetes packaged with a lot of commonly-needed extra functionality / tools) A "hello world" written in Go is 2mb to begin with so ~4mb is a bit unrealistic for any substantial piece of software written in Go. Although if that colors your opinion of Go itself, you're certainly allowed to have that opinion :)
- latchkey 5y ago
  Your logic doesn't work because adding functionality doesn't necessary translate to a huge increase in binary size. The complex app (15k lines of code) that is distributed to these machines, written in Go, is just over 3mb compressed with xz. Plus this is still many orders of magnitude off with trying to get 160mb off to mobile devices per the image in the article. It is a non-starter.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dralley 5y ago
    I'm going to take a guess that even a "mini" distribution of Kubernetes is more than 15k lines of code though. k3s is quite a bit smaller than this but it's still only described as "<50 megabytes"
    - latchkey 5y ago
      I'm not sure the point of your argument. Somehow we should just accept 160meg downloads to a phone, because why?
      - dralley 5y ago
        I don't understand the point of your argument, because nobody (including the announcement above) is talking about phones. From the post: > Imagine one of these small devices located in a vehicle to run AI algorithms for autonomous driving, or being able to monitor oil and gas plants in remote locations to perform predictive maintenance, or running workloads in a satellite as you would do in your own laptop. Now contrast this to centralized, highly controlled data centers where power and network conditions are usually very stable thanks to high available infrastructure — this is one of the key differences that define edge environments. > Field-deployed devices are often Single Board Computers (SBCs) chosen based on performance-to-energy/cost ratio, usually with lower-end memory and CPU options. These devices are centrally imaged by the manufacturer or the end user’s central IT before getting shipped to remote sites such as roof-top cabinets housing 5G antennas, manufacturing plants, etc. > At the remote site, a technician will screw the device to the wall, plug the power and the network cables and the work is done. Provisioning of these devices is “plug & go” with no console, keyboard or qualified personnel. In addition, these systems lack out-of-band management controllers so the provisioning model totally differs from those that we use with regular full-size servers. I don't read this and think "phones". This sounds like it's targeted at embedded industrial / telecom devices. (At least based on the examples they chose, I'm sure you could use it for other things). The word "mobile" doesn't actually appear anywhere on the page so I'm not sure where you got "mobile devices" from.

speedgoose 5y ago

Using advanced devops tools for IoT is always interesting. I have seen a few demos that were variations of the following comic : https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/26/the-internet-of-things-a-revolution/ https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/26/the-internet-of-th... One demo using Microsoft Azure IoT hub, docker, digital twins (a glorified json from memory), and a raspberry pi was fun because it took minutes to deploy something to make a light blink.

candiddevmike 5y ago

It's getting harder and harder to find the kubernetes part of openshift--wtf is openshift-dns? I'm not sold that this is better than k3s, and I think red hat isn't capable of balancing the needs of both a sprawling borg-like platform that assimilates all kube functions vs a lean kube experience.

nullify88 5y ago
Openshift-dns is just their custom operator which deploys and configures CoreDNS. OpenShift is k8s with alot of RH operators bundled in to configure stuff like monitoring, logging, networking, ingress, etc.
BossingAround 5y ago
> wtf is openshift-dns I think one thing I'm definitely missing from the OpenShift docs [1] is reasoning. What does it add? Why do I want to learn to use an operator instead? Otherwise, it's pretty clear that it's just an operator on top of CoreDNS. I do think that the docs are utterly devoid of Kubernetes content. I think historically, RH tried to differentiate themselves from K8s. Now, it can definitely hurt the knowledge migration and transfer. [1] https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.8/networking/dns-operator.html https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.8/networking...
- freedomben 5y ago
  I can't speak for Red Hat but I have a lot of experience with OpenShift. Basically all of these operators are there to allow customization. The philosophy behind OpenShift is to move everything possible to operators so they can be managed in a cloud native way. This has a bunch of benefits like being fully declarative, and able to keep your whole config in version control.
freedomben 5y ago
Red Hat is definitely not going for a "lean" kube experience. OpenShift is heavy AF (for good reasons but still). They're going for "this includes everything you need for a full platform." For users that are openshift on the backend it's pretty nice to have uniformity with the edge too. This will be "light enough" for most cases although of course it can be further improved.

blinkingled 5y ago

I don't see any reason to bring the IoT buzzword into this - but I am not a marketing guy. Standard OpenShift (Ok, I will try to refrain from profanity) is extremely resource intensive even for most fat enterprise environments. They could have just one product based off of what they are calling MicroShift - less resource usage, modular to the core so customers can add precisely what they need - some will use the IoT profile, some will use minimal-enterprise and so on. Right now they just try to smother you with lot of baggage and burden and their solution to everything is run a managed one in AWS - i.e. dictate the choices. I just never liked the idea of taking something like open source k8s and creating a Redhat specific version that requires different treatment and whole lot of other enterprise stuff including RHEL. And it doesn't work all that better than GKE or EKS or even building your own cluster (I have done all 3.) They should have just created tooling around standard K8s and allowed customers to use the good parts - deployment workflows, s2i etc. basically plugging the gaps on top of standard k8s. I can totally see lot of customers seeing value in that.

hosteur 5y ago
That would be a much better product for the users. But not for the business. Less vendor lock-in.
- aspenmayer 5y ago
  Better still for the business to make a product that people use!
nullify88 5y ago
I'm running both OpenShift and k3s in production, and there isnt that much that requires different treatment between the two. There are some specific OpenShift APIs (like routes which are terrible) and some quality of life improvements (service-ca signer) but nothing drastic.
- blinkingled 5y ago
  Have you tried running istio for example in an enterprise env - they needed you to install a RH specific older version and IIRC that wasn't just for support. I could list some more things if I recalled hard enough.

m3adow 5y ago

Will this be availabe as Open Source version (MicroOKD?) as well? I don't see it mentioned in the blog post. I'd love to see how the resource consumption compares to k3s.

freedomben 5y ago
I'm sure it will. It's more a question "when" than "if."
cpitman 5y ago
This is an open source project from the start (as most things red hat creates), you can find the coffee here: https://github.com/redhat-et/microshift https://github.com/redhat-et/microshift

asim 5y ago

Is this anything like the canonical distribution called microk8s? https://microk8s.io/ https://microk8s.io/ On the naming front, why is everyone calling it MicroX. There can be only one Micro. https://micro.dev https://micro.dev

BossingAround 5y ago
> why is everyone calling it MicroX Probably because "micro" means "small" in Greek, and the whole Kubernetes uses Greek. > There can be only one Micro. https://micro.dev https://micro.dev Call me grumpy, but I spent 5 minutes on the site and still have no idea what "micro.dev" is other than "a platform for cloud-native development" (yeah, what isn't nowadays?)

seeekr 5y ago

Red Hat's answer to (now SuSe's) k3s?

tremon 5y ago

I understand where the name is coming from, but Microshift is treading dangerously close to certain other company's name and trademarks. What are the chances Microsoft will see this as trademark infringement?

ww520 5y ago
Whatever happened to the Michaelsoft case?

acbdgx 5y ago

jamesy0ung 5y ago

This vs k3s?

bbarn 5y ago

Probably should have done some digging before trying to coin a new name. Microshift is a huge chinese company making bicycle parts for over a decade.

tomcam 5y ago
mxuribe 5y ago
I wonder if maybe they could have gone with OpenMicro instead? I don't really dislike Microsift that much but my brain did immediately auto-insert the ending of "Micro"...with ...soft. So, there's that prejudice right there. ;-)
sfjailbird 5y ago
There was already a 'MiniShift' version of OpenShift, so the name makes some sense. Not that RedHat has been consistent with naming this product generally, what with RedShift, OKD, OpenShift, etc.

kristianpaul 5y ago

I keep saying Microchip instead

SeanLuke 5y ago

It's worth mentioning that MicroSHIFT is a large Taiwanese bicycle components manufacturer. It's unlikely there's a trademark infringement issue as they're in different markets, but this is kind of like a bike company naming its new product "Hewlett-Packard".

zucker42 5y ago
It would be if Hewlett and Packard were common English words.
- SeanLuke 5y ago
  All right. How about "MicroSoft".
  - kitchi 5y ago
    I could see a socks or underwear manufacturer called MicroSoft. Aren't trademarks domain specific anyway? Unless Nadella suddenly decides to branch into fashion of course.

dopp0 5y ago

That would be a wonderful name for Microsoft back in the day. maybe some extra letter there, but that's fine