0xC45
Joined 6 years ago
Karma
101
Submissions
14
Member since
Dec 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 11 months ago
For an open source, local (or cloud) vector DB, I would also recommend checking out Chroma (https://trychroma.com). It also supports full text search. Disclaimer: I work on Chroma cloud.
Comment · 6 years ago
Yeah, I guess it's somewhat "half-and-half" currently. The k8s cluster is definitely an experimental zone. The spare cycles on the main ESXi host are also available for testing out ideas, etc. However, I guess a benefit of having regular backups and an easy way to re-provision the services with ansible means that the risk (and cost) of breaking something is fairly low.
Comment · 6 years ago
Haha. I'm a little bit lacking in my "k8s ops" skills and hope to learn by practicing! Currently there isn't any serious "production" workload running on the k8s cluster. Perhaps if I become more comfortable with managing the k8s cluster, I will migrate my other services onto k8s. We'll see!
Comment · 6 years ago
It felt like overkill to dedicate an entire NUC to running the K8s control plane. So, I split each NUC in half. Only one node is running the control plane (and, I have prevented any other workloads from running on the control node as a best practice). The other 5 nodes are available for running whatever workloads. There's probably a bit of a performance hit from running two separate OS's and kubelets on each NUC, but I'm hoping it won't matter too much in practice.
Comment · 6 years ago
Hey, I like this idea! Actually, I only have a single node running the control plane. And, to answer the original question, it felt like overkill to dedicate an entire NUC to running just the control plane. So, I decided to run two k8s nodes on each NUC. I guess there's potentially a bit of a performance hit due to the extra overhead of running multiple kubelets, but it hopefully won't matter too much in practice.
Comment · 6 years ago
Yeah, unfortunately the free ESXi makes it difficult to "programmatically" create VMs. However, I decided that it was an acceptable trade-off for now. It would be super cool to run a script with "nothing" running on your network and have it set up everything from the ground up. Perhaps I'll manage to get there someday as well.
Comment · 6 years ago
Thanks for the advice about the NAS. Perhaps it's best to leave critical data and backups to a professional product.
As for the firewall, I had a Ubiquiti Security Gateway for a while and it worked great. Not sure how it compares to the UniFi Dream Machine, however. The only reason I made a custom firewall is because I wanted to try and learn a bit about firewalls and routing in general. And, since my own device has worked well for me so far, I haven't bothered to replace it.
Comment · 6 years ago
Hey, thanks for all the good ideas.
About the custom "VM-only" machine: currently I'm a little lacking in my "k8s ops" skills. So, until I am more comfortable managing the k8s environment, I have decided to continue using VMs for my "production" workloads. Until then, the K8s cluster will be treated like more of an experimental zone and I can worry less about breaking things.
As for the K8s storage options -- I don't really know! Haven't quite figured that one out. Like I mentioned in the blog post, I haven't really placed any serious workload on the K8s cluster yet. However, I have heard good things about OpenEBS (https://openebs.io/) and am considering that as a potential option in order to make use of the local SSDs on each NUC.
For single-node K8s, there are lots of good options. I haven't used it personally, but I know that MicroK8s (https://microk8s.io/) works well even in a single-node environment. It might be worth checking out.