Comment by nrdvana
5 hours ago
Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet, and not worry about hardware failing. It's true that a laptop probably has more resources than the smallest VMs, but no remote management interface and can't scale if you suddenly had a surge of traffic.
> Yeah but for $6/mo you can get a tiny linode or digital ocean droplet
That gets you, what, 1 "vCPU" with maybe a gig of ram and a couple of dozen gig of disk.
If you (or a friend) work for a company of any size, there's probably a cupboard full of laptops that won't upgrade to Win11 sitting there doing nothing that you could get for free just by asking the right person. It'll have 4 or 8 cores, each of which is more powerful that the "vCPU" in that droplet. It'll have 8 or maybe 16gig of ram, and at least half a TB of disk and depending on that laptop quite likely to be able to be configured with half a TB of fast nVME storage and a few TB of slower spinning rust storage.
If you want 8vCPUs/cores, 16GB of ram, and 500GB of SSD, all of a sudden Digital Ocean looks more like $250/month.
If you are somewhere in that grey area where you need more than ivCPU and 1GB of memory, grabbing the laptop out of the cupboard that your PM or one of the admin staff upgraded from last year and shipping not off to a datacenter with your flavour of linux installed seems like it's worth considering.
Hell, get together with a friend and have two laptops hosted for 14Euro/month between you, and be each others "failing hardware" backup plan...
> ...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/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.
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.
>> ...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 landing page: "Free KVM-over-IP access to your laptop - just like having it right next to you."
> From the 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.
You really don't know how much it costs, do you?
Check https://tinypilotkvm.com/collections/all-products these are the cheapest ones.
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