Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

I'm just trying to understand, I see three of those machines, inside a pretty nice rack, with the switches, routers, a keyboard, I would assume some fairly high quality hard drive / RAID type of thing etc. then the blog post claims "We run our Edge infrastructure on commodity hardware that costs us, ballpark, $1000/restaurant. ". Just the intel nuc I can find on newegg alone costs $349 each, with no memory or harddrive installed, retail. I know they are likely getting amazing volume discounts but it still seems amazing that whole stack could possibly be only $1000 each.

View on HN

This is Caleb (SRE on this project). Here’s a similar NUC we use ... this one is like $300... just an example of what we use; https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1316113-REG/intel_box...

Just curious (since I work in edge computing products) the deploy here seems rather complicated... What are your feelings on the matter and is there a market for simpler deployments?

Caleb, I'm working on a project with a similar architecture (on-prem services). I'm curious what your auth-pattern looks like as it's something we've struggled with. Mostly the balance between being convenient and being secure. It seems like each site needs an api key to access your cloud. Do you have an auth-pattern that would prevent the key from being readily available to an attacker who got access to the machine? Or do you kinda just say if they get access to the machine, then it's game over? Also with shoddy networks it is difficult to be confident that key-rotation will happen successfully. Happy to get your thoughts. Cheers.

I'd assume it's 3x$349 that they're referring to in the article, since most places these days already have some networking equipment (probably including a racked switch someplace) in order to provide guest wifi, connect POS terminals, etc. So that portion isn't directly tied to this effort.

Intel NUCs come in a wide price range (for example on Newegg the Celeron-based NUC is $130)

This is Brian -- I wrote the article (I suspect I will be typing that a lot tonight). We do clusters with 3 nodes per restaurant, so at full scale (when we have rolled out to every restaurant in the chain) that will be ~6000 nodes, and growing by new stores * 3 going forward. This will support an estimated 100k IoT "things" of various types in the next year and a half to two years (estimate)

Hey Brian, I have been investigating deploying a very similar stack to what you guys are using now. How are you handling onsite load balancing? Is it a simple round robin type load balancer at the router level?

Also is Highlander open source? I don't see a link to it in the article.

We will open source highlander eventually, but it’s not quite there yet.

We use a VIP that the NUCs share... ie; one of the three will always have a VIP, and if it dies another NUC grabs it. This is a poor man’s load balancer in that sense, because we only have the NUC hardware onsite;

https://github.com/kubernetes/contrib/tree/master/keepalived...

We are also looking at metallb

Volume pricing maybe? 2,000 stores, so around 3,000 units.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com