[JustinGarrison]

I'm actually confused about what ClusterdOS is and does besides glue a bunch of projects together in an opinionated way.

It sits on top of Kubernetes and seems very hand wavy about how you create and manage those clusters.

[stryan]

As far as I can tell and from some quick researching of the guys previous experience, that's all it is. I think the implication is that LLM's will be architecting and deploying the cluster setups at some point? Which sounds horrific so I'm assuming I am interpreting it long

The article itself reminds me of the enthusiasm I felt for plan9 when I first heard about it back in uni. I also thought everyone should have their own compute grids and that clustered computing was the future; of course now I realize there's a lot of reasons why that doesn't actually work. Considering this appears to be a start-up ad, I hope the author knows something I don't.

[hedgehog]

Claude Code + Ansible + whatever stuff needs to be managed gives some visibility and control and in my experience is reliable enough to be useful.

[stryan]

I'm assuming you're at least overseeing the creation/updates of the Ansible playbooks and have some familiarity with what is being managed outside of that. While I personally would not do that[0], I can see the reasoning behind it.

ClusterdOS appears to be a kubernetes-in-a-box multiple node setup that's goal is to work so well that the user doesn't know or care what it's doing. I wouldn't trust an LLM with managing one machine by itself, let alone a whole cluster of them running the incredibly complex mess that Kubernetes is (and that's not even counting the 8 other layers of software this is), so this feels like an order of magnitude worse.

[0] Using LLMs for sysadmin research or boilerplate writing is one thing, but after a certain amount of use you're really just paying $X a month for Anthropic to manage your systems for you. I'd rather just pay a real person to do it at that point. I'd also rather people get over their pathological fear of learning how to run a server but I've given up on that.

[hedgehog]

I've been using various UNIXes and clones since the 90s so I do generally know what's going on but I also have no desire to fill my brain with the syntax to the new new new commands to configure an Ethernet interface on Linux etc, or the work necessary to understand fully why VA-API on a certain chip has specific quirks that break freerdp, nor the toil of backporting and patching the necessary libraries, or the specific dance required to set up a machine to TFTP new firmware onto one of the switches, or.... You get the idea.

I'm also not a fan of all the complexity of Kubernetes, one directory with simple to read files makes it a lot more transparent what's where and how it's set up, and the commit history + changelogs make it relatively clear what's changing and why. No distributed database or fancy bootstrapping, just a ubiquitous config format and tool to apply. Changes at the granularity of "a new host is available at A.B.C.D, configure it as a dev server" or "add a new Debian system container named 'blah' to X, bridge it to the research network only, limit to 16 hyperthreads / 64 gb ram, set up for development on git://<whatever>". It works ok for now.

The next major change will be when models that run locally are capable enough to drive the config changes themselves.

[druid]

* * *