Kubernetes on Bare Metal

[kalamania]

Interesting, I always thought Bare Metal is synonym for actual hardware server, but the author mixes those:

> Bare metal for this conversation means a regular VM/VPS provider or a regular private provider like Proxmox with no special services - or actual hardware.

Is this a common theme nowadays?

The article itself is of course really nice, it shows that "Kubernetes is hard to set up" theme is not always right.

[jdwithit]

I agree with you. Bare metal to me always implies, well, actual physical servers made out of metal :) A better title might have been "Kubernetes Without a Cloud" or "Kubernetes on-premise". Since what the author is trying to recreate is all the ancillary services that are there for the taking when you run in a cloud provider. Load balancing, storage, cert management, firewall rules, all fronted by easy to consume API's. Which are the actual hard part of setting up a functional k8s cluster.

[detaro]

Calling VMs/VPS bare metal is unusual from what I see.

[chefgoldbluum]

I thought Bare Metal meant dedicated hardware in the cloud. E.g. Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/pricing/baremetal/) distinguishes VPS vs bare metal as you getting access to entire physical servers without neighbours. Not entirely sure if this is standard nomenclature though.

[borplk]

In modern "cloud" terminology bare metal means "no virtualisation" AFAIK.

[pknopf]

I think he means "native", as in native to the host (regardless if it's virtualized or not).

[LogicX]

I also was confused about the title - expected to see an article about spinning up a cluster in Packet.net

[namidark]

I used bare metal to combine both bare VPS providers and regular hardware -- basically anything without 'cloudy' options (ie: VPCs, ELBs, etc)

[bryanlarsen]

Bare metal is a valid title for this article because his instructions wouldn't change if it actually was bare metal.

[kahlonel]

Slightly off topic, but I feel like calling an internet server running an OS "bare-metal" is a disgrace to what "bare-metal" originally and historically referred to, i.e. computer hardware without any OS. Maybe IaaS providers are running out of creative names that they are now polluting other techs' namespace?

[orev]

To me, bare metal has meant running on an OS that’s directly on the hardware, instead of a virtual machine. However, I can see your point about what it could mean (i.e. the software itself is compiled to directly run on the hardware with no OS), but I’m struggling to think of a time when anything worked like that. You have to go really, really far back in history to apply that definition to general purpose computing systems. I’m left thinking that it would only really apply to embedded systems and hardware controllers, and many of those now even have some kind of micro-os that runs on them.

[ur-whale]

The younger you are, the higher up you operate in the pile of layers that modern computing has become, with little to no understanding of what's beneath.

[haolez]

That's a little unfair. The article shows options to run on "real" bare-metal hardware, but the same tools will work on cloud instances as well.

[ofrzeta]

From your profile I see that you are interested in embedded systems, so that probably explains why you are upset. After almost two decades of virtualization I think "bare metal" has become a common term for server computing without VM. I am old but had no problems understanding the term as it was meant. Meanings of words vary with context and change over time.

[chefgoldbluum]

I used Kubespray on Container Linux with Calico. Maybe I got lucky but I had it working perfectly almost first try. I think I needed to handle like one error in the entire Ansible playbook.

[bryanlarsen]

Agreed, I've set up about 6 different clusters using kubespray and never had any issues. Kubeadm is nice for dev clusters but there are still a bunch of hoops you have to jump through to set up an HA cluster using kubeadm.

[androidgirl]

Thanks for this reccomendation! I just checked out the repo and this looks really interesting, I'll have to try it out.

[buttersbrian]

What's the best approach for on-premise k8 clusters?