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BenElgar

159 karma · joined February 17, 2015

I'm the founder of Krucible (https://usekrucible.com) and former engineer at MongoDB. I love building tools for other developers, particularly in the infrastructure space.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/benelgar; my proof: https://keybase.io/benelgar/sigs/m5aFJYK7Q9eEwo97rx9nX7lUC8La33bauZAD1wFJYwU ]

Email: me@benelgar.com | ben@usekrucible.com

meet.hn/city/us-New-York

Interests: Technology, Startups, Philosophy, Privacy, Programming, Networking, Investment

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submissionscomments
BenElgar··on Show HN: Instantly search 28M books from OpenLibrary
Cool! Small bit of feedback: typing each character adds an entry to the browser's history which seems a bit excessive. Might consider using replaceState over pushState.
BenElgar··on US to ban transactions with ByteDance and WeChat in 45 days
The visa fees certainly are: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/Visa-Rec...

It's also a fundamental principle of the EU's visa policy: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...

BenElgar··on Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
Why do you include Social Security in the list of things that won't be eliminated? I'm not American but in my understanding UBI would almost completely eliminate Social Security, along with putting a big dent in the need for Medicare and Medicaid.
BenElgar··on Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0
That's not UBI though, that's a negative income tax.
BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
Author here. At the last two companies I've worked at we really needed—and didn't have—a solution for spinning up throwaway Kubernetes clusters that we could use for testing and development. Krucible is an attempt to solve that problem.

Krucible replaces minikube/kind[0] with faster, cloud-hosted Kubernetes clusters that are easier to spin up from inside of CI/CD environments and that don't consume a large amount of local resources.

Happy to answer any questions!

[0] Or whichever other Kubernetes provider you use for testing and development

BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
> Kubernetes supports resource requests and resources quotas to combat this. You should be protecting your production workloads this way anyway.

That's certainly good advice and would significantly reduce the likelihood of issues but it doesn't handle all cases. For instance it's not particularly easy to quota network bandwidth.

Ultimately all of these problems are likely solvable—we just think that Krucible is easier, simpler and safer.

BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
There are definitely some use cases where having a local-to-your-machine development environment is more suitable but, as you say, Krucible is easier to set up and comes with features that just running k3d doesn't, like snapshots. Our experience is that ensuring that developers are all running in the same environment is pretty valuable by itself.
BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
By having a dedicated Kuberntes cluster you reduce the blast radius. For instance, if you roll out a new version of your services that unexpected consumes a significant quantity of resources, if you were running that on your production cluster that could interfere with your production workload.

In a similar vein, if you have 10 or even 100 end-to-end test suites, with Krucible you could run them all in parallel, significantly reducing the time taken, without fear of them impacting each other. In your shared cluster scenario you would be limited by the size of your cluster.

BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
I think Krucible could be very helpful for you here. Each student could sign up for a Krucible account and spin up up to 25 free clusters. Should be plenty for teaching purposes.

You could also prepare a cluster with a certain configuration in advance, snapshot it and then create new clusters from that snapshot so that all students could quickly get started with a Kubernetes cluster in a given state.

Get in touch and I'd be happy to help you get things set up. Email is ben@usekrucible.com.

BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
Really it depends what you're testing and deploying. For instance, if you're developing a new microservice, it's helpful to be working with the same service discovery mechanism that is running in your production cluster. When you're testing, presumably you also want to ideally test any Kubernetes changes that you make before you deploy to your production servers. Krucible is ideal for that.
BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
Krucible is hosted, so you're not running a VM that's consuming resources and that you have to manage—spinning up Minikube from within a CI environment isn't necessarily the easiest of tasks. With Krucible it's just a single API call to create a Kubernetes cluster. This also allows you to parallelise your test suite easily as you can spin up as many clusters as you need at the same time.

The snapshots feature is also a big differentiator: you can set up a cluster, take a snapshot and then share that with your team so that you're all running identical Kubernetes clusters.

BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
Author here. At the last two companies I've worked at we really needed—and didn't have—a solution for spinning up throwaway Kubernetes clusters that we could use for testing and development. Krucible is an attempt to solve that problem.

We've just released a really cool feature called Snapshots that allows you to image a running Kubernetes cluster, including the state of all applications, and then create new clusters from that image. It's great for creating consistent development environments or quick starting test environments.

Happy to answer any questions people might have.

BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible — Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
Author here. At the last two companies I've worked at we really needed—and didn't have—a solution for spinning up throwaway Kubernetes clusters that we could use for testing and development. Krucible is an attempt to solve that problem.

We've just released a really cool feature called Snapshots that allows you to image a running Kubernetes cluster, including the state of all applications, and then create new clusters from that image. It's great for creating consistent development environments or quick starting test environments.

Happy to answer any questions people might have.

BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – temporary Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
kind can definitely be made to work in CI but it's often difficult. For instance it's not necessarily easy to spin up new containers from within the container that your CI job is executing in. That's not an unsolvable problem but Krucible eliminates the problem entirely.
BenElgar··on Show HN: Krucible – temporary Kubernetes clusters for testing and development
Author here. At the last two companies I've worked at we really needed—and didn't have—a solution for spinning up throwaway Kubernetes clusters that we could, for example, easily and reliably test our deployment process in. Kind (https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind) does a pretty good job of addressing that but requires setting up a bunch of infrastructure that needs to be maintained and doesn't easily work in a containerised CI environment. Krucible is an attempt at solving those problems by allowing you to spin up Kubernetes clusters via an API quickly and affordably.

Krucible is still in its early stages but I wanted to show it to the community and get feedback. Happy to answer any questions.

BenElgar··on Switch from Chrome to Firefox
Try Firefox for mobile. As a bonus you'll get add-ons as well so you can block ads.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/mobile/

BenElgar··on Tor Browser 8.5
Though it's important to note that using Tor directly rather than the browser bundle means that your browser fingerprint is even more distinct than it would otherwise be.
BenElgar··on Costco opening a $440M chicken farm to escape America's chicken monopoly
The antibiotics are needed because they're so poorly treated. The chickens wouldn't get sick if they weren't packed into battery farms. The antibiotics aren't always necessary either, it's just more profitable to have the animal spend less energy fighting illness that it would otherwise have survived.
BenElgar··on Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access To Your Shadow Contact Information
That's exactly what The Washington Post does. They have a free option where "You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads" and a "Premium EU Ad-Free Subscription" with "No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/

BenElgar··on In UK universities there is a daily erosion of integrity
Most people value both though; when I was in university I loved what I did and wanted to continue doing it somewhere excellent afterwards. For that I need to be armed both with the knowledge and the qualifications necessary.
BenElgar··on CoinTracker raises $1.5M to make tracking cryptocurrency investments easy
Why is that a golden rule? Genuine curiosity.
BenElgar··on Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring
Speaking for at least some of the H1Bs and other non-immigrant visa holders, they'll leave—taking the savings from their Bay Area salary back to Europe, Asia, Central America or another place with reasonable living costs. I've always thought that that was one of the most compelling, pragmatic reasons to fast track the citizenship process.
BenElgar··on The Mac Pro Lives
It is important to note that they aren't identical:

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53633/does-using-ctr...

BenElgar··on LastPass RCE vulnerability fixed
I believe 1Password only supports Windows and OS X on the desktop.
BenElgar··on Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
Don't know why you appear to be being downvoted. You're right, I'm wrong. :)
BenElgar··on Ask HN: Which Berkeley Courses Should I Archive?
From a quick search:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764

TLDR: The videos were removed because of a lawsuit relating to the lack of captions, making them inaccessible to the deaf.

BenElgar··on Study: Immigrants Founded 51% of U.S. Billion-Dollar Startups
For an example of the top of my head, take tax returns. In the UK the vast majority of people don't need to file one—your employer deducts the right amount each month from your salary and off you go. Moving to America I found I had to spend at least half a dozen hours trying to figure out what I had to do, eventually giving up and paying for a service to do it for me and am still unsure I filed correctly.

For another example, take getting a driver's license. In the UK you fill in a form online, they extract any other relevant details from your passport records and put in your credit card details and they send you a license within the week. It's a 15 minute process. In America I got to finding out I had to go to the DMV (and that I should go to the DMV in another city because it's somehow superior) and promptly gave up.

I know you said aside from healthcare, but even if you had the hypothetical best insurance available, with no co-pay or deductible, just keeping track of all of the arcane and opaque numbers, policies and restrictions is a huge administrative burden.

Now to be clear, I understand why some of these systems are the way they are and, in some cases, can see the necessity, but the fact remains that in almost any other developed nation there simply wouldn't be an equivalent administrative burden to just existing.

BenElgar··on Google Cloud Platform Free Tier
Finally! I've been making the point for years now that the reason new developers start with AWS is because of their much more useful 12 month free tier. People from GCP would come to our university every couple of years and ask us "Why don't you use GCP?" and be told by countless computer science undergraduates that they didn't NEED $300 for a couple of months, they needed at least a year of time with a cheap instance or two. It seems they finally listened.
BenElgar··on Britain passed the “most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy”
There's an important difference between the members of the party and its members of parliament.
BenElgar··on Maine Ranked Choice Voting Initiative Approved
In my mind, the problem with Approval Voting is that it's harder to decide how one should vote. What's the cut-off? Do I vote for everyone I really believe in? Or everyone I don't loathe? And it's exactly that sort of question which leads to tactical voting. With IRV it's easy. Just order them until you're indifferent to the rest of the candidates.
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