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Canonical Launches MicroCloud to Deploy Your Own "Fully Functional Cloud"
- sen 3y agoSo.. we’re back to self-hosting your own services? And IT does another cycle.
- withinboredom 3y agoSome of us never left... I can't justify paying that much money just to execute some code on another person's server.
- f6v 3y agoAnd some will never leave cloud.
- sumtechguy 3y agoThat is where you run the cost calculations and decide if it is worth it or not. At the very first it can make zero sense to run in cloud. Then slightly in it becomes very worth it. Then later on that cost overhang becomes so big you are better off building your own. Where those boundaries are depends on your business.
- willsmith72 3y agoI think the opposite, at the start it's a no-brainer. Setting up cloud infra for a simple website or web api is so so simple, and between free tiers and startup credits, costs $0.
- sumtechguy 3y agofair point...
- withinboredom 3y agoI think it depends. For example, if I needed machines running 24/7 running some stuff, then I would eat through those cloud credits so fast. For example, managed k8s is actually pretty cheap in the cloud, but you can't turn off their logging solution, and even on the lowest setting, storage for those logs will cost you an arm and a leg. However, if you can use something like serverless or even just regular vms, you can be super cheap at the start. It all just depends on what you're doing.
- cortesoft 3y agoIt can be cheaper to run things in the cloud if your workload is very spiky or short lived.
- soneil 3y agoWe never really left. I work with an enterprisey on-prem product, which we of-course tried to replace with a cloud offer. And in all fairness, it's generally gone well - but because we manage the platform, it sits in the cloud we chose. And that's never going to be the right choice for everyone. So we have some customers who are concerned about national boundaries. We have some customers who offer their own clouds, and aren't hugely enthusiastic about using the competition's. And then the whole mess with the govt having isolated regions within otherwise-public cloud offers. Between these, it quickly became apparent that replacing our traditional offer with *aaS would leave a lot of money on the table. It's a minority of customers, but it turns out to be a very valuable minority. Within that context at least, "private clouds" start to feel like they have legs - bringing most of the benefits of the cloud, to places that 'public' can't reach.
- topspin 3y ago> It's a minority of customers, but it turns out to be a very valuable minority. I've been saying this for years. The Ubuntu vision here is appealing: storage and live migration as first class things, because many high value services are never going to be "cloud native," easily scheduled, stateless, ephemeral container apps: the stuff k8s et al. was designed for. So they have the right model. Now it's down to execution.
- dividedbyzero 3y ago> And IT does another cycle. People keep saying that as if it was a bad thing
- pjmlp 3y agoUsually it is great for those of us that sell consulting services, for the others not really.
- lproven 3y agoIt wouldn't be a bad thing if people learned from the previous iteration. But they don't. In fact, what they generally do is layer an implementation of the stuff they forgot last time on top of the preceding iteration which lacked it. So now, we have clusters of Linux boxes, built with a ton of new tooling on top of Linux because Linux is a UNIX and traditional UNIX doesn't have networking or clustering in the design. (Go on, then, 2 PCs on a LAN, both running a bare Linux kernel and a shell for init. Call them box1 and box2. Tell me how you mount the filesystem of box2 in a folder on box1.) Plan 9 is UNIX 2.0 and can do this out of the box, but we didn't adopt Plan 9 so now we have to emulate it in a million lines of Rust or something. Now we have WASM which is kinda sorta compiling to the bare bytecode of the Javascript runtime, for universal app binaries. Only you need a vast infrastructure to run it. Inferno is UNIX 3.0 and can do this out of the box: it has the Dis VM right in the kernel, and all its components are compiled to Dis bytecode so binaries run on all supported processors. But we didn't adopt Inferno so now we have to emulate it in a million lines of C++ because Mozilla cancelled Rust.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- worthless-trash 3y agoFeatures are backed by code. The code has to exist somewhere, in previous systems it ran as ring0. Is this where you want your privesc ?
- lproven 3y ago
- hospitalJail 3y agoAlways depends on the usecase. Medical, we do everything in-house to make life easier. Low value servers, in-house. High uptime + scalable? You are not doing that in-house.
- rozenmd 3y agoIt's not so much a cycle as a helix IMO, things are better now.
- AugustoCAS 3y agoI have the strong impression that most people confound cloud to be public only. Private clouds are fine and deliver a lot of the flexibility at a big % discount of a public cloud. The big gain from clouds is the flexible infrastructure, especially in the microservices world we are now. In the past, one needed to procure, provision, etc a new server to run a service (times X per environment). With a cloud, regardless if it's public or private, provisioning a VM (or container) to run a new service is a few clicks away.
- mywacaday 3y agoCurrently watching a large enterprise migrate to cloud and hosted private cloud(I know) but all most teams are doing is a 1:1 mapping of VMs. I can see the cost going through the roof vs on prem. Give it another three years and and we'll be rolling back a significant % to on prem.
- _jal 3y agoI'm currently working on planning for a large enterprise migration. We're definitely not doing a 1:1 mapping of VMs, but costs are still going to go through the roof. There might be a quiet betting pool on just how much more.
- baz00 3y agoYep. My future is cloud offboarding and cost mitigation consultancy. Been through the fad cycle three times now and worked out where to make money :)
- throw0101a 3y ago> So.. we’re back to self-hosting your own services? It never stopped: plenty of places have on-site VMware and Hyper-V, both of which provide (IIRC) APIs to automated VM creation. If you're more open source, there's OpenStack (which VMware has a API-compat layer for).
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoYes, but spending money on garbage tech products fuels the economy now. It's not like we make anything else.
- Havoc 3y ago> snap > Ubuntu Pro > driving […] subscription Think I’ll stick LXC on proxmox
- tmikaeld 3y agoDitto, been running Proxmox 15+ years and it's been rock solid. The only thing I miss is the kind of automatic deployment and network layers that Kubernetes has.
- doublerabbit 3y agoGood choice. FreeBSD and jailed bHyve cells for me.
- redundantly 3y agoIt's been a few years since I've looked at bhyve. Is it maturing well? Are there any tools that make managing it easier now?
- doublerabbit 3y agoVery stable. Libvirt is supported. So you can now use a GUI [0] [1] There's a few web control panels too if that's your thing. I can't fault it. A bit rough round the edges and manual in some places but as expected. Has tackled everything I've thrown at it from Windows Servers to Linux, VPNs to Routers all very well. You won't get the bells and whistles of an enterprise hypervisor, however for a Tier-2 hypervisor, it's smooth sailings. [0] https://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/libvirt/virt-manager.html https://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/libvirt/virt-manager.htm... [1] https://libvirt.org/drvbhyve.html https://libvirt.org/drvbhyve.html
- doublepg23 3y agoWhat's the container story like? It might be fun running my homelab on FreeBSD 14...
- lproven 3y agoThis was my take, FWIW. https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/16/canonical_microcloud/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/16/canonical_microcloud/
- linuxftw 3y agoThis demo is very hard to follow indeed. They are just jumping around, demoing features, but not talking about how it all fits together.
- lproven 3y agoI agree, but as I said in the article, the first stage of the demo failed, and after some frantic attempts to tear down and rebuild the cluster, they gave up, moved on to later stage of the demo, and then came back to it. Which is why it's incoherent and doesn't fit together.
- dilyevsky 3y agoThis is why you always prepare videos
- cloudbonsai 3y agoMmm. So is MicroCloud essentially a glue between LXD + Ceph? It's not really clear what the problem MicroCloud is trying to solve, though. Considering that LXD already supports multi-node clustering, why does anyone want another cluster manager on top of LXD?
- tyingq 3y agoParaphrased, they are saying LXD is more suited to running VMs or containers and not specifically microservices. It's missing sophisticated cross-container networking, centralized storage management, etc. So they are pitching a "simpler than K8S, more complicated than LXD" layer on top of LXD for that purpose. I suppose it also would compete with Proxmox, which is a somewhat different space than K8S. But other things it adds, like the web ui, RBAC, etc...put it in that space also.
- lloydatkinson 3y agoI recently tried Mikrok8s from Canonical and at idle (as in not running any of my containers) it ranges from 5% to 15%. I hope this product doesn't suffer the same wastage.
- AugustoCAS 3y agoI had the same problem (there's a github issue about this: https://github.com/canonical/microk8s/issues/2186 https://github.com/canonical/microk8s/issues/2186). I swapped to k3s and the usage was half of what microk8s used.
- millerhooks 3y agoThere are issues with the grvfs client that gets into a race condition with the disc volumes. It will saturate the max_connections and eat resources at idle. Not sure if this is your issue, I have yet to find a real solution other than uninstalling grvfs-backends and bumping the max user and connections. I got this workaround added to the charmed kubeflow QuickStart. It’s not the correct solution though and I’m pretty spent on the issue.
- Eumenes 3y agoSo OpenStack?
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoBut actually less features than OpenStack. Kind of weird that they didn't just package OpenStack. A vendor to manage it for you would actually provide business value
- wmf 3y agoUbuntu has had OpenStack for years. It sucks. MicroCloud looks like a simpler, saner reboot.
- Throwfi44 3y agoAt home I have a small server farm of cheap Ryzen PCs. Mostly continuous integration and testing for open source projects, but also some LLM. If I have some idea, I just throw it into farm and see results a few days later. It is slower than renting in cloud, bit about 4x cheaper. It also heats my house a bit in winter...
- Roark66 3y agoYou must have cheap electricity where you live...
- nisa 3y agoLet's assume I have huge server at home with tons of disks that sucks on average 200W 24/7 - most machines idle around 10-50W depending on the periphials I'm in Germany, the country with the most expensive electricity prices - I'm paying 31cent/kWh at the moment. That's about the current market price for consumers - so that's 543,48€/year or 45€/month if that machine would suck 200W on average over the year. If you are lucky have fiber at home - let's say another 50€/month and add 5€ for electricity for fiber and switches and stuff so you pay 100€/month for self-hosting at home. Using the pricing of the big public clouds like Google, AWS, Azure you can stuff quite a bit of CPU and SSD's and HDD into that machine until you hit the 200W limit. I just looked at Azure and took the cheapest instances for dev and compared the reserved price for one year (so already discounted) Azure that gets me a whopping B4s v2 instance with 4 vcores and 16 GiB and no storage and no bandwidth. Using Hetzner a cheap german dedicated server discounter you can rent a Intel Core i9-13900 with 64GB memory and 2 x 1.92TB SSD for 100€/month. Realistically you would buy a Beelink SER6 Max Mini-PC, AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS that idles probably around 15W and only pay 40€/year for that. It's 640€ new here and much faster than that Intel machine. You can almost buy two of these and still only pay 105€ a month and in the second year it's only 80€/year. Of course there is no redudancy, no support, no flexibility your home ISP is probably overbooked and so on and so on - if you just a big machine somehwere that can fail but works most of the time it can be a cheaper alternative.
- ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
- DiabloD3 3y agoThis is going to be very uncomfortable when Supermicro sues Canonical over a trademarked term. Supermicro has been selling Microclouds for years, and is a well known product line in the industry.
- tw04 3y agoJust like it was a very uncomfortable situation when Anderson sued Microsoft over the term windows? Canonical is selling a piece of software, supermicro a line of servers. And based on their own site it isn’t trademarked. Notice there’s no r next to the microcloud server but there is next to microblade. https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/blade https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/blade
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DiabloD3 3y agoInteresting, I wonder if Supermicro applied for the TM but was rejected. Either way, Supermicro will most likely make noise about this. We'll find out if I'm right when Canonical changes the name.
- kunwon1 3y agoI tried very hard to get onboard with Ubuntu's new server paradigm, I've been using Ubuntu on and off since 2005. Snap is what turned me away. My research (admittedly several years out of date) told me that it was impossible to disable 'auto-updating' of Snaps. Now I see that they're rolling out what is apparently a high availability service built on services deployed through Snap. I don't see how this is viable, if Snap is still dead set on updating things on their own schedule. I certainly wouldn't trust it without some in-depth testing and validation to ensure that Canonical can't remotely DoS me by pushing some new update that I can't opt out of.
- rlpb 3y agoThis changed a while ago. See "Pause or stop automatic updates" at https://snapcraft.io/docs/managing-updates https://snapcraft.io/docs/managing-updates
- kunwon1 3y agoCheers! A step in the right direction.
- _zoltan_ 3y agosnaps are horrible and a big deterrent. I stopped recommending ubuntu because of them. Total dead end.
- Scubabear68 3y agoWhat are the implications of the AGPL license for this (if any)?
- oopsthrowpass 3y agomy understanding is that you can't sell this cloud as a service (AWS would not be able to use it)
- count 3y agoSure they can, they just have to make the code available that is in what they deploy.
- meonkeys 3y agoIt means all derivative works of microcloud must also be licensed AGPL (if someone else "links" other software into it, makes modifications and re-distributes, they must provide those modifications, etc). Any company can sell microcloud, but it must remain AGPL. This license choice is a defense against microcloud being assimilated into proprietary products. (Now I'll guess at the motivation of your original question. Lemme know if I missed your point...) The AGPL doesn't apply to any containers or VMs running in a microcloud any more than Ubuntu's licensing applies to programs you run on Ubuntu.
- sunshine-o 3y agoPotentially great move for Ubuntu if the economic conditions push companies to invest to reduce their IT opex & get off the public clouds (and also if Gartner tell them to do so...). Now I know Ubuntu just launched the product but damn they suck at selling it. The landing page doesn't even give you examples of applications you can run on it. Also I'm sorry but you need to have the word "docker" a few times on that page if you want to catch any flies. Your CTO/CIO will also want to see some kind of fake enterprise app store to consider it.
- grumpyprole 3y agoIt's only "fully functional" if it's running Haskell or OCaml. ducks