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Here's a tweet from Solomon Hykes noting, if WASM existed back in 2008, he wouldn't have created Docker! https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324

Here's a tweet from Solomon Hykes noting, if WASM existed back in 2008, he wouldn't have created Docker! https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225?s=21 https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/1111004913222324225?s... My biggest concern with K8s is how the entire ecosystem is a costly affair. Can I run a service with multiple nodes for 10-50$ per month? This is why I'd love WASM to win. Right now your browser can run 100s of tabs, with inter-tab communications and all the security sophistications on a single machine. For me, this symbolises a future where WASM can bring cheaper computing to the cloud as well. I don't want to pay a fortune as AWS/Azure bills just because k8s is a costly ecosystem.

harpratap 5y ago
> My biggest concern with K8s is how the entire ecosystem is a costly affair. Can I run a service with multiple nodes for 10-50$ per month? If your service can run on few nodes, do you really need a scheduler like K8s? Why not go serverless like Fargate or CloudRun?
option_greek 5y ago
More and more it appears that k8s is designed to extract maximum value from the tenants of the cloud companies. You need to connect your cluster to public Internet? No problem that's $x for each load balancer (whether its needed or not). Ohh you are feeling the whole thing feels like a blackbox and difficult to debug or observe? No problem that is $x for data dog. Gcp is the worst when it comes to setting up k8s with preemptive nodes. Thought you could get away with preemptive nodes? Not so fast, we restart all the nodes together at end of 24 hours period so that your multi node cluster will have zero availability for 5 minutes everyday. Or jump through hoops to killing your own nodes periodically to keep them all restarting at the same time.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Those aren't features of Kubernetes. If you like you can install a free ingress such as NginX and route traffic to it. If you like you can just have logs on your physical nodes and go look one by one, just as you would have to before things like k8s came along. Datadog is a value add. It's not essential. GCP preemptible VMs are nothing to do with k8s - they are literally designed to be short-term (up to 24 hours) VMs to do things with. Yes, GKE can use them, but not as persistent resources. That's not what they're for. Here's what they're for: > Preemptible VMs are Compute Engine VM instances that last a maximum of 24 hours, and provide no availability guarantees. I.e. don't try and "get away with" them. There are plenty of options for cheap K8s.
  - marcos100 5y ago
    Yes, you can setup your own kubernetes if you want, using just ec2, but nobody wants to do it because it's easier to just pay. I think k8s actually saves you money, because it allows you to use your resources better.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Yep - you can also just use a VPS or even some Raspberry Pis in your home.
  - option_greek 5y ago
    The ingress can be free with Nginx but not the inbound firewall rule that passes the traffic to Nginx. And 'coincidentally' it costs the same $ as using their load balancer which automatically has this rule applied.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      You're talking about a cloud provider's fees, not kubernetes.
    - immibis 5y ago
      It sounds like it's just setting up the load balancer for you behind the scenes? Kubernetes isn't a load balancing engine, to my knowledge. It just sets up containers and stuff.
- guywhocodes 5y ago
  If there is anything nefarious in the design and rollout of k8s it's just to make it uncool to run something small. I've worked with it for a bunch of years now and run a cluster at home, but I do hate that it scales down so poorly. Is so much work to run a bare minimum, if not for SME-purposes but for local development. It's just starting to get acceptable.
- Bayart 5y ago
  My only real gripe with GCP is that every project is set up to use their premium networking tier by default.
trhway 5y ago
> if WASM existed back in 2008, he wouldn't have created Docker! doubt it as there was JVM back then. >This is why I'd love WASM to win. Right now your browser can run 100s of tabs, with inter-tab communications and all the security sophistications on a single machine. Now just add K8s on top to orchestrate it :) Somebody will just develop new WASM based container ...
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Ah, but WASM is Java for the haters, so it sells much better at the bytecode shop.
  - jason0597 5y ago
    I wonder why the Java haters chose WASM over Kotlin
    - ptx 5y ago
      Kotlin for WASM is in the works[1], so once that arrives they won't have to choose between them. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqz9sKXatw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqz9sKXatw
    - immibis 5y ago
      "I wonder why the C++ haters chose ARM over Go" is a comparable sentence. I hope the error is clear.
      - jason0597 5y ago
        I don't think so. The parent said: >[...] WASM is Java for the haters, so it sells much better at the bytecode shop. Which means WASM was advertised as a new bytecode VM to replace Java. What I'm saying is that, for these supposed Java haters, why did they choose to completely reinvent the bytecode VM when they could have just chosen Kotlin and not have to reinvent the wheel? It would fix most if not all of their concerns about Java.
- 5y ago
vbezhenar 5y ago
When I’m reading about Kubernetes, it makes me tremble. Like you need three servers with 16 GB RAM each just for some management stuff. I have one server with 1 GB RAM. Can I start with that? And expand on more servers later if need arises.
- gndoped 5y ago
  I think k3d would be a good choice for you as others have mentioned. It's a lightweight wrapper on top of k3s - https://k3d.io/v5.2.2/ https://k3d.io/v5.2.2/
- guywhocodes 5y ago
  Yes with 1GB you can run k3s.
- Bayart 5y ago
  Yes you can, that's the point really. You can just start off on your own machine with something like Minikube [1] and deploy to GCP on a bunch of much larger nodes to see how it behaves. The overhead of Kubernetes itself isn't much, it's just a bunch of API daemons. For small scale development, plain docker/podman is better in my opinion. [1]: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/
- KronisLV 5y ago
  Seconding K3s being a good option, supports most distros and is easy to set up in minutes: https://k3s.io/ https://k3s.io/ If you'd like to use a management UI instead of just the CLI, Portainer is also a wonderfully lightweight option: https://www.portainer.io/ https://www.portainer.io/ (and also supports Docker Swarm, if you'd like even more lightweight container orchestration) That said, in my eyes the biggest problem with Kubernetes is that some distros by default reserve resources and thus disallow overcommit, which is fine from a stability perspective, but doesn't really work for overcommit scenarios. For example, with Docker Swarm, it's exceedingly easy to say: "Okay, this PostgreSQL instance can use anywhere from 0 to 256 MB of RAM, but no more than that" and with 1 GB of RAM i could easily run 8 of those instances if the average usage was half or less of this maximum limit - a risk that i'd sometimes like to take, when i know that the limits in place are more along the lines of controls so that the whole OS doesn't run into OOM errors. Of course, if you mess around with the YAML, i guess that's doable on some level as well. As a sidenote: most of the software that i run (Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Node, Go, PHP) all is memory constrained most of the times, so when looking for server specs, i usually prioritized the memory the highest, CPU, storage and network speed all usually being a secondary concern. Sadly, in the current day and age, i'm not sure how far you could actually get with 1 GB or why even use container orchestration at that point. The smallest VPSes that i have come with 2 GB of RAM and even those are for smaller pages/proxies and such, whereas the majority have at least 4 GB (since GitLab and Nexus won't launch and work with much less) and my homelab servers have 16 GB, whereas my workstation has 24 GB at this point, because that's all that i can afford. Wirth's law be damned, i doubt that even OSes will work well with that much in the future, especially because of desktop software being infected with Electron and server software having JVM eat as much memory as you'll give it (though that also happens with MySQL or MariaDB). I don't care about "Unused RAM is wasted RAM" as much as others do, i just want to run more stuff on my servers and to have software that doesn't NEED the memory not take it.
guywhocodes 5y ago
Docker was not the only container based system back then and we did have other projects for running arbitrary code in the browser. Were they as good as WASM? No but the browser wasn't as good either. Point is it's not just WASM that makes him feel that way today. It's pretty damn hard to roll back your mind 12 years and then apply 12 years of innovation from the side and make accurate predictions of what you would have done differently. Just like "if we had internet in the 19th centry", it implies so much more.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Ironically the only WASM that is as good as Flash tooling in 2011, is Flash itself recompiled to WASM.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
But why using a browser in the first place ? It's not like your OS is incapable of running 100s of processes (with inter-process communications and all the security sophistications), without the additional weird abstraction of tabs and the browser quirks...
- immibis 5y ago
  IDK either. It's like we have meta-platforms, or platform adapters. Platforms inside platforms.
- KingMachiavelli 5y ago
  Right... Chromium uses user namespaces as part of its own security model but I'm not sure how that extends to v8 or WASM runtimes. Where's the line between implementing a security model in a userspace VM and just providing an abstracting layer on top of OS features?
immibis 5y ago
Why can't you run multiple Docker containers with inter-container communications and all the security sophistications on a single machine? You can do exactly that. I suspect you have different expectations from Docker and WASM, such as expecting to run heavy things in Docker and light things in WASM. Anyway, to make WASM useful as a server platform it will end up re-implementing the entire Linux kernel API.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Doesn't Docker re-implement about 30% of the Linux kernel API?
hinkley 5y ago
I wonder if it makes sense to build up a WASM environment on a union filesystem (layers) as it mostly seems to in Docker.
nsonha 5y ago
this is hyperbole, wasm is just code, it has nothing for data, networking, instrument, observability. How do you deploy your stack to wasm? You compile all the services to it, then what? Write more code to wire them together?

harpratap 5y ago

> My biggest concern with K8s is how the entire ecosystem is a costly affair. Can I run a service with multiple nodes for 10-50$ per month? If your service can run on few nodes, do you really need a scheduler like K8s? Why not go serverless like Fargate or CloudRun?

option_greek 5y ago

More and more it appears that k8s is designed to extract maximum value from the tenants of the cloud companies. You need to connect your cluster to public Internet? No problem that's $x for each load balancer (whether its needed or not). Ohh you are feeling the whole thing feels like a blackbox and difficult to debug or observe? No problem that is $x for data dog. Gcp is the worst when it comes to setting up k8s with preemptive nodes. Thought you could get away with preemptive nodes? Not so fast, we restart all the nodes together at end of 24 hours period so that your multi node cluster will have zero availability for 5 minutes everyday. Or jump through hoops to killing your own nodes periodically to keep them all restarting at the same time.

robertlagrant 5y ago
Those aren't features of Kubernetes. If you like you can install a free ingress such as NginX and route traffic to it. If you like you can just have logs on your physical nodes and go look one by one, just as you would have to before things like k8s came along. Datadog is a value add. It's not essential. GCP preemptible VMs are nothing to do with k8s - they are literally designed to be short-term (up to 24 hours) VMs to do things with. Yes, GKE can use them, but not as persistent resources. That's not what they're for. Here's what they're for: > Preemptible VMs are Compute Engine VM instances that last a maximum of 24 hours, and provide no availability guarantees. I.e. don't try and "get away with" them. There are plenty of options for cheap K8s.
- marcos100 5y ago
  Yes, you can setup your own kubernetes if you want, using just ec2, but nobody wants to do it because it's easier to just pay. I think k8s actually saves you money, because it allows you to use your resources better.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Yep - you can also just use a VPS or even some Raspberry Pis in your home.
- option_greek 5y ago
  The ingress can be free with Nginx but not the inbound firewall rule that passes the traffic to Nginx. And 'coincidentally' it costs the same $ as using their load balancer which automatically has this rule applied.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    You're talking about a cloud provider's fees, not kubernetes.
  - immibis 5y ago
    It sounds like it's just setting up the load balancer for you behind the scenes? Kubernetes isn't a load balancing engine, to my knowledge. It just sets up containers and stuff.
guywhocodes 5y ago
If there is anything nefarious in the design and rollout of k8s it's just to make it uncool to run something small. I've worked with it for a bunch of years now and run a cluster at home, but I do hate that it scales down so poorly. Is so much work to run a bare minimum, if not for SME-purposes but for local development. It's just starting to get acceptable.
Bayart 5y ago
My only real gripe with GCP is that every project is set up to use their premium networking tier by default.

trhway 5y ago

> if WASM existed back in 2008, he wouldn't have created Docker! doubt it as there was JVM back then. >This is why I'd love WASM to win. Right now your browser can run 100s of tabs, with inter-tab communications and all the security sophistications on a single machine. Now just add K8s on top to orchestrate it :) Somebody will just develop new WASM based container ...

pjmlp 5y ago
Ah, but WASM is Java for the haters, so it sells much better at the bytecode shop.
- jason0597 5y ago
  I wonder why the Java haters chose WASM over Kotlin
  - ptx 5y ago
    Kotlin for WASM is in the works[1], so once that arrives they won't have to choose between them. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqz9sKXatw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqz9sKXatw
  - immibis 5y ago
    "I wonder why the C++ haters chose ARM over Go" is a comparable sentence. I hope the error is clear.
    - jason0597 5y ago
      I don't think so. The parent said: >[...] WASM is Java for the haters, so it sells much better at the bytecode shop. Which means WASM was advertised as a new bytecode VM to replace Java. What I'm saying is that, for these supposed Java haters, why did they choose to completely reinvent the bytecode VM when they could have just chosen Kotlin and not have to reinvent the wheel? It would fix most if not all of their concerns about Java.
5y ago

vbezhenar 5y ago

When I’m reading about Kubernetes, it makes me tremble. Like you need three servers with 16 GB RAM each just for some management stuff. I have one server with 1 GB RAM. Can I start with that? And expand on more servers later if need arises.

gndoped 5y ago
I think k3d would be a good choice for you as others have mentioned. It's a lightweight wrapper on top of k3s - https://k3d.io/v5.2.2/ https://k3d.io/v5.2.2/
guywhocodes 5y ago
Yes with 1GB you can run k3s.
Bayart 5y ago
Yes you can, that's the point really. You can just start off on your own machine with something like Minikube [1] and deploy to GCP on a bunch of much larger nodes to see how it behaves. The overhead of Kubernetes itself isn't much, it's just a bunch of API daemons. For small scale development, plain docker/podman is better in my opinion. [1]: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/
KronisLV 5y ago
Seconding K3s being a good option, supports most distros and is easy to set up in minutes: https://k3s.io/ https://k3s.io/ If you'd like to use a management UI instead of just the CLI, Portainer is also a wonderfully lightweight option: https://www.portainer.io/ https://www.portainer.io/ (and also supports Docker Swarm, if you'd like even more lightweight container orchestration) That said, in my eyes the biggest problem with Kubernetes is that some distros by default reserve resources and thus disallow overcommit, which is fine from a stability perspective, but doesn't really work for overcommit scenarios. For example, with Docker Swarm, it's exceedingly easy to say: "Okay, this PostgreSQL instance can use anywhere from 0 to 256 MB of RAM, but no more than that" and with 1 GB of RAM i could easily run 8 of those instances if the average usage was half or less of this maximum limit - a risk that i'd sometimes like to take, when i know that the limits in place are more along the lines of controls so that the whole OS doesn't run into OOM errors. Of course, if you mess around with the YAML, i guess that's doable on some level as well. As a sidenote: most of the software that i run (Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, Node, Go, PHP) all is memory constrained most of the times, so when looking for server specs, i usually prioritized the memory the highest, CPU, storage and network speed all usually being a secondary concern. Sadly, in the current day and age, i'm not sure how far you could actually get with 1 GB or why even use container orchestration at that point. The smallest VPSes that i have come with 2 GB of RAM and even those are for smaller pages/proxies and such, whereas the majority have at least 4 GB (since GitLab and Nexus won't launch and work with much less) and my homelab servers have 16 GB, whereas my workstation has 24 GB at this point, because that's all that i can afford. Wirth's law be damned, i doubt that even OSes will work well with that much in the future, especially because of desktop software being infected with Electron and server software having JVM eat as much memory as you'll give it (though that also happens with MySQL or MariaDB). I don't care about "Unused RAM is wasted RAM" as much as others do, i just want to run more stuff on my servers and to have software that doesn't NEED the memory not take it.

guywhocodes 5y ago

Docker was not the only container based system back then and we did have other projects for running arbitrary code in the browser. Were they as good as WASM? No but the browser wasn't as good either. Point is it's not just WASM that makes him feel that way today. It's pretty damn hard to roll back your mind 12 years and then apply 12 years of innovation from the side and make accurate predictions of what you would have done differently. Just like "if we had internet in the 19th centry", it implies so much more.

pjmlp 5y ago
Ironically the only WASM that is as good as Flash tooling in 2011, is Flash itself recompiled to WASM.

BlueTemplar 5y ago

But why using a browser in the first place ? It's not like your OS is incapable of running 100s of processes (with inter-process communications and all the security sophistications), without the additional weird abstraction of tabs and the browser quirks...

immibis 5y ago
IDK either. It's like we have meta-platforms, or platform adapters. Platforms inside platforms.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
Right... Chromium uses user namespaces as part of its own security model but I'm not sure how that extends to v8 or WASM runtimes. Where's the line between implementing a security model in a userspace VM and just providing an abstracting layer on top of OS features?

immibis 5y ago

Why can't you run multiple Docker containers with inter-container communications and all the security sophistications on a single machine? You can do exactly that. I suspect you have different expectations from Docker and WASM, such as expecting to run heavy things in Docker and light things in WASM. Anyway, to make WASM useful as a server platform it will end up re-implementing the entire Linux kernel API.

hinkley 5y ago
Doesn't Docker re-implement about 30% of the Linux kernel API?

hinkley 5y ago

I wonder if it makes sense to build up a WASM environment on a union filesystem (layers) as it mostly seems to in Docker.

nsonha 5y ago

this is hyperbole, wasm is just code, it has nothing for data, networking, instrument, observability. How do you deploy your stack to wasm? You compile all the services to it, then what? Write more code to wire them together?