Create a portable kubernetes cloud

I travel a lot. Really, and I like strong computers — as wasting time on slow responses is not efficient.

When I come to a client — I bring a portable office with me, that means the keyboard I am used to and have all the shortcuts on, cables that could cover anything I need, from various screen adapters to phones and chargers. I always work on the network cable and do not rely on wifi because of latency.

In this world — when we are extremely used for dockers running everywhere and kubernetes cluster are the regular workflow I wanted to have an always available cluster that I could take to any office. It should run all the databases and CI that I use on my day-to-day, as well as dedicated data I might need for the client

The most obvious solution you could say is just to use kubernetes cluster built into you docker installation — but:

1. if you run it on your laptop — your laptop will not be as fast and resources will go to the cluster
2. your laptop is not always on — that means your CI build will not run all the time, and every time you need that redis, Postgres or anything that you have on the laptop you will have to turn it on
3. I do not work on a laptop day to day — the hardware is much stronger on desktop

At this point, a simple consideration could be — set up an EKS on AWS and run whatever you need there. It would be quite costly ( base price would be above 200$ a month) and the biggest turn off for me was— many times I rely on a cellular connection, as some clients are disconnected from the web.

So what this cloud has to be:

1. portable
2. can work in a disconnected environment — some private switch
3. can be used as the main build cluster in my office — so that I will not have to remember to transfer data or to get used to something different from my day to day flow

Continue reading on my blog