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> ...no remote management interface... I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. I also bet rachelbythebay has at

> ...no remote management interface... I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. I also bet rachelbythebay has at least one article that talks about the topic. > ...can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic. 1) If your public server serves entirely or nearly-entirely static data, you're going to saturate your network before you saturate the CPU resources on that laptop. 2) Even if it isn't, computers are way faster than folks give them credit for when you're not weighing them down with Kubernetes and/or running swarms of VMs. [0] 3) <https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos15-paper-mcsherry.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/hotos15/hotos...> (2015) [0] These are useful tools. But if you're going to be tossing a laptop in a colo (or buying a "tiny linode or [DO] droplet"), YAGNI.

bigiain 6mo ago
>> ...no remote management interface... > I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."
- justsomehnguy 6mo ago
  You really don't know how much it costs, do you? Check https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products these are the cheapest ones.
  - simoncion 6mo ago
    MSRP for remote-capable KVMs is irrelevant. You (the person paying to co-locate hardware) don't buy the KVM that the colo facility uses. The colo facility hooks up the KVM that they own to your hardware and configures it so that you can access it. Once you stop paying to colo your hardware, you take your hardware back (or maybe pay them to dispose of it, I guess) and they keep the KVM, because it's theirs.
  - jiggunjer 6mo ago
    I think a raspberry pi setup would be the cheapest? Not as professional perhaps.
- simoncion 6mo ago
  > From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: Yeah. I got bored a couple of hours after I posted that speculation and found several other colo facilities that mentioned that they'd do remote KVM. I'd figured that it was a common thing (a fair chunk of hardware you might want to colo either doesn't have IPMI or doesn't have IPMI that's worth a damn), but wasn't sure.
literalAardvark 6mo ago
k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). It encourages some dumb decisions that do, such as using Prometheus stack with default settings, but by itself it just eats a lot of ram. Now using CPU limits in k8s with cgroups v1 does hurt performance. But doing that would hurt performance without k8s too.
- simoncion 6mo ago
  > k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). Sorry, what "k1s" are you referring to? The only projects with that name that I see are either cut-down management CLIs and GUIs that only work with a preexisting Kubernetes cluster, or years-old abandoned proof-of-concept/alpha-grade Kubernetes reimplementations that are completely unsuitable as a Kubernetes replacement. The only actually-functional cut-down Kubernetes I'm aware of is 'minikube'. Minikube requires -at minimum- 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. [0] That doesn't fit on either of the machines 'nrdvana' was talking about... not the "tiny ... digital ocean droplet", with its 1CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB of disk space [1], nor the "tiny linode" (which has roughly the same specs [2]). Given that it's not at all uncommon for discarded laptops to have 4 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and like 250GB of disk, eating 1/4th of the RAM, (intermittently) half of the CPU power, and roughly a tenth of the disk space just for Kubernetes housekeeping kinda sucks. That's pretty damn "heavy", in my judgment. So. Do you have a link to this 'k1s' thing you were talking about? Does it use less than 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk? [0] <https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/> [1] <https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-can-save https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-...> [2] <https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be> [3] [3] Did you know that Linode got bought by Akami? I didn't!
  - literalAardvark 6mo ago
    Sorry I meant k0s. Off by one error at 3 am. There are a couple of things here: first off, minikube isn't tuned for low resources, it's a full k8s packaged for developers. Second, it doesn't burn much CPU at all unless you blew it up and it's churning pods. Third, try to remember that you're running a tool that provides most of what you need to run a service, it's not a bare VM, it comes with reverse proxy, tons of tools, and cluster management. Basically those minimal specs let you actually run quite a lot of stuff on that minikube, they're not just for the management system. k0s needs roughly 500MB RAM and 1.5GB drive to run a controller+worker. Can probably pare k3s down to that as well. And I repeat, this gets you single pane cluster management across all your laptops, reverse proxy, DNS, resource shaping, namespaces, etc. Only big problem with it is that adding distributed storage is quite heavy and unstable (longhorn) or really heavy (ceph), so storage management might need to be manual which is a pain in k8s.

bigiain 6mo ago

>> ...no remote management interface... > I bet colos will plug a KVM into your hardware and give you remote access to that KVM. From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."

justsomehnguy 6mo ago
You really don't know how much it costs, do you? Check https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products these are the cheapest ones.
- simoncion 6mo ago
  MSRP for remote-capable KVMs is irrelevant. You (the person paying to co-locate hardware) don't buy the KVM that the colo facility uses. The colo facility hooks up the KVM that they own to your hardware and configures it so that you can access it. Once you stop paying to colo your hardware, you take your hardware back (or maybe pay them to dispose of it, I guess) and they keep the KVM, because it's theirs.
- jiggunjer 6mo ago
  I think a raspberry pi setup would be the cheapest? Not as professional perhaps.
simoncion 6mo ago
> From the https://www.colaptop.com https://www.colaptop.com landing page: Yeah. I got bored a couple of hours after I posted that speculation and found several other colo facilities that mentioned that they'd do remote KVM. I'd figured that it was a common thing (a fair chunk of hardware you might want to colo either doesn't have IPMI or doesn't have IPMI that's worth a damn), but wasn't sure.

literalAardvark 6mo ago

k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). It encourages some dumb decisions that do, such as using Prometheus stack with default settings, but by itself it just eats a lot of ram. Now using CPU limits in k8s with cgroups v1 does hurt performance. But doing that would hurt performance without k8s too.

simoncion 6mo ago
> k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). Sorry, what "k1s" are you referring to? The only projects with that name that I see are either cut-down management CLIs and GUIs that only work with a preexisting Kubernetes cluster, or years-old abandoned proof-of-concept/alpha-grade Kubernetes reimplementations that are completely unsuitable as a Kubernetes replacement. The only actually-functional cut-down Kubernetes I'm aware of is 'minikube'. Minikube requires -at minimum- 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. [0] That doesn't fit on either of the machines 'nrdvana' was talking about... not the "tiny ... digital ocean droplet", with its 1CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB of disk space [1], nor the "tiny linode" (which has roughly the same specs [2]). Given that it's not at all uncommon for discarded laptops to have 4 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and like 250GB of disk, eating 1/4th of the RAM, (intermittently) half of the CPU power, and roughly a tenth of the disk space just for Kubernetes housekeeping kinda sucks. That's pretty damn "heavy", in my judgment. So. Do you have a link to this 'k1s' thing you were talking about? Does it use less than 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk? [0] <https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/> [1] <https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-can-save https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-...> [2] <https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be> [3] [3] Did you know that Linode got bought by Akami? I didn't!
- literalAardvark 6mo ago
  Sorry I meant k0s. Off by one error at 3 am. There are a couple of things here: first off, minikube isn't tuned for low resources, it's a full k8s packaged for developers. Second, it doesn't burn much CPU at all unless you blew it up and it's churning pods. Third, try to remember that you're running a tool that provides most of what you need to run a service, it's not a bare VM, it comes with reverse proxy, tons of tools, and cluster management. Basically those minimal specs let you actually run quite a lot of stuff on that minikube, they're not just for the management system. k0s needs roughly 500MB RAM and 1.5GB drive to run a controller+worker. Can probably pare k3s down to that as well. And I repeat, this gets you single pane cluster management across all your laptops, reverse proxy, DNS, resource shaping, namespaces, etc. Only big problem with it is that adding distributed storage is quite heavy and unstable (longhorn) or really heavy (ceph), so storage management might need to be manual which is a pain in k8s.