Odyssey X86 Single-Board Computer

Vladimir Rusinov — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 13:49:00 GMT

Shortly after setting-up single-node Kubernetes cluster, single-node Ceph cluster I wanted an actual cluster. I've also noticed that Ceph doesn't actually work all that well: Besides obvious lack of failure tolerance, it didn't seemed to like working on top of just two storage devices of a very different sizes (internal ~300G HDD and 1T USB-HDD). So I've decided to get some more hardware.

I live in a small apartment and I don't really have a lot of space. All I have is a small shelf in storage area. Normal desktops and especially rack servers won't fit. They are also noisy, eat a lot of power and produce a lot of heat. Another thing is that I already had two old SATA HDDs lying idle, which I wanted to use, so the new hardware needed SATA support.

I found the solution in Odyssey X86 board.

Setting up single-node Ceph cluster for Kubernetes

Vladimir Rusinov — Sat, 03 Apr 2021 17:16:36 GMT

After setting up my shiny single-node Kubernetes "cluster" I wanted to do something useful with it. Many of the useful things require your useful data not to disappear, so I needed to figure out how to do that.

In Kubernetes storage is organized via Volumes. These Volumes can be attached to Pods via Volume Claims. There are two types of Volumes: regular ones and Persistent Volumes. Regular Volumes are ephemeral and destroyed together with Pods (e.g. when it crashes or rescheduled). These are of course less interesting than Persistent Volumes which as the name suggest survive Pod restarts.

There are many ways to implement Persistent Volumes, the simplest is probably to use Local Persistent Volumes. They simply bind local directory into pod. However they force pods to be always running on the same node.

This was not interesting enough for me so I went with something more complicated.

www.rusinov.ie (Posts about Ceph filesystem)

Odyssey X86 Single-Board Computer

Setting up single-node Ceph cluster for Kubernetes