I need
It's just fun to play with, there is no "need".
Hint: :q!
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I need
It's just fun to play with, there is no "need".
Yeah, I enjoyed my time with k3s setup at home as well, but right now I don't really want nor need that π
I need a kubernetes cluster with high availability, load balancing and horizontal pod autoscaling, because that is something I want to learn. I don't care that it's just for wife's home-made dog collars webshop.
This is the way
You can do it on a handful of Raspberry Pis rather than one, then.
I don't get this; a Pi isn't even in the same conversation as an old rackmount server you can get for free. You couldn't stuff half the compute, ram and storage into a Pi or a dozen Pis for 10X the cost of grabbing something off eBay for a hundred bucks.
That's if the Rpi Foundation is deigning to let us peasants even buy them these days.
I have an old rackmount server I got for free. Dual Xeon X5650s, 192GB of RAM, four 8TB HDDs, and a pair of 250GB SSDs. I can only use it in the basement because itβs too loud to run anywhere else, but even then, itβs currently off because it trips its circuit breaker under heavy load.
A power strip full of Pis in a k3s cluster doesnβt do that. I used a 2GB model 4 for the control plane and 3Bs as the workers.
Switched from a raspberry pi 3 to a second hand x86 thin client (lenovo thinkcentre m920q) because raspberry pi 4 were not available at the time. Made me learn proxmox and a bunch of other cool stuff my raspi couldn't handle.
I'm rooting for ARM / RISC-V to become more popular in desktop computing / servers though.
I've always liked riscv. Just the idea of literally everything on the device being open source is a fun idea. Manuals to everything.
Just because the ISA is open source doesn't mean that the end product or even the design will be open source.
RISC-V is licensed permissively, giving anyone the right to make a proprietary (or FOSS) RISC-V processor.
Often times, you'll see mostly open source cores, but then some extention is proprietary.
Waiting for proxmox-arm becoming a thing (I know there's some community versions trying it but I'm not sure how reliable they are)
The hardware virtualisation available for arm just isnβt there yet
Apple Silicon Macs do a great job with virtualization. Outside of them there's just no nice high end hardware that's well suited for something like proxmox. It's either low end SBC, or the hyper proprietary ARM servers that I don't think we can even buy.
This struggle usually takes place over a weekend.
This guy selfhosts
i think the best choice is a cheap used pc or laptop, or server. Reduces electric waste. I also host my own server on a 19 year old Dell Insprion 1300
Think centre tiny here
Low consumption, two ddr4 slots, one 2.5" slot and one nvme slot! Lots of outside slots.
Costed less used than a new pi too. They have gotten too expensive IMO.
Pi has gotten crazy expensive.
Reduces electric waste
A lot of older equipment actually wastes more electricity.
But it will cut down on electronic waste.
Yes, but also no. Older hardware is less power efficient, which is a cost in its own right, but also decreases backup runtime during power failure, and generates more noise and heat. It also lacks modern accelerated computing, like ai cores or hardware video encoders or decoders, if you are running those appd. Not to mention lack of nvme support, or a good NIC.
For me a good compromise is to recycle hardware upgrades every 4-5 years. A 19 year old computer? I would not bother.
Bro, I am just hosting a WordPress backup, an RSS reader, and a few Python scripts
A mini PC is a good middle ground. Mostly for the video transcode and machine learning power.
Yeah, a mini PC... or if you already have one, why not 5 mini PCs?
I think any mini-pc/old laptop is better, and probably cheaper than a raspberry pi nowadays
I would have disagreed with you when Pis were like $50 and chaining 3 Pis together with a hard drive was a fun project to do self hosting.
Now to get to the beefiest raspberry pi, it's $120. And in the range, yeah, for price and reliability, use a mini-pc/laptop.
I've discovered that there are a lot of medium-tier software engineers who immediately will go straight to horizontal scaling (i.e: just throw hardware at it), and I've seen instances where very highly skilled engineers just write their code better, set things up on a bare metal server, cache things, etc. and manage with just a single badass server
Even just the choice of programming language makes a big difference. Running a JVM language or NodeJS, Python, Ruby etc., you can be bottlenecked by a Pi. Meanwhile, Rust or C/C++ will use barely a fraction of those resources.
I've found that a pi is good enough, computationally, but not reliability wise.
A lot of things like advanced light control goes through my host, so any lockups or crashes are bad. My pi held up for about 18 months before it began to play up. I've found a small NUC system has higher reliability for the same price and power usage.
See, I don't pay for the electric bill to keep my collection of old enterprise equipment running because I need the performance. I keep them running because I have no resistance to the power of blinkenlights.
Yup, a pi is enough for me.
Well... 5 Pis and an ancient NUC running proxmox are enough for me. And a DS920+... and an old laptop running docker are enough for me.
With Linux any old computer from yesteryear can become a quick server. That's what I do, just make sure you got backups.
I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.
I spend all day at work exploring the inside of the k8s sausage factory so I'm inured to the horrors and can fix basically anything that breaks. The way k8s handles ingress and service discovery makes it absolutely worth it to me. The fact that I can create an HTTPProxy
and have external-dns automagically expose it via DNS is really nice. I never have to worry about port conflicts, and I can upgrade my shit whenever with no (or minimal) downtime, which is nice for smart home stuff. Most of what I run tends to be singleton statefulsets or single-leader deployments managed with leases, and I only do horizontal for minimal HA, not at all for perf. If something gives me more trouble running in HA than it does in singleton mode then it's being run as a singleton.
k8s is a complex system with priorities that diverge from what is ideal for usage at home, but it can be really nice. There are certain things that just get their own VM (Home Assistant is a big one) because they don't containerize/k8serize well though.
The only problem I've had with Raspberry Pi is that some apps want to write a lot of stuff to "disk", and the default "disk" on a Pi is a MicroSD card which dies if you keep writing things to it. Sure, you can always plug something into a USB slot, but that adds a bit of friction to the whole process.
Oh, also, I wish it were easy to power a whole bunch of Pi units. Each one needing its own wall wart is a bit annoying, and I've had iffy results using weaker, less steady power supplies with multiple ports intended for things like phones.
So close. Started on raspberry pi. Went for a cluster with dpckrt swarm. Finished with a nas and a 10years old game computer as a mediacenter. (That the electricity bill whoch made me stop the cluster)
Ha ha
Under-complicated -> over-complicated -> under-complicated.
There's a 'just right' that I think you skipped through.
Same, in fact you can also went down in RPi models. Basically the more you know, the less you need, e.g. going from Plex to Kodi to minidlna...