I ported Kubernetes to the browser

151

ppeterdemin about 5 hours ago 49 commentsRead Article on ngrok.com

DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

https://github.com/ngrok/webernetes

https://webernetes-demo.ngrok.app/

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85% Positive

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Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dinkleberg•about 4 hours ago

This is cool. As someone who has authored Kubernetes educational content in a past role, I can definitely see the appeal of building something like this. iirc we first used Katacoda and then used some other similar platform and they were very useful since they spun up a fresh instance on the fly for each user with a specific setup.

Though it seems like right now this is probably better for conceptual/architectural education. The real fun is when you start learning to master kubectl.

throw2ih020•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, in a past role this would have been awesome for diagrams to explain how the control plane works, illustrating the degradation and failure modes, or comparing different architectures/ways to deploy onto k8s/

samwho•about 2 hours ago

Sadly Katacoda got paywalled (totally get why they did it, these things have costs). I think some other similar platforms disappeared because they ran out of people willing to fund it. It’s a shame.

I’m hoping this offers an alternative. It has the risk of becoming out of date with reality, but at least even in that case the core should ~always be relevant.

leetrout•about 1 hour ago

katacoda got bought by o'reilly and went to shit from there. We tried to give them money in 2020 and they just sent us a templated email to "go self qualify with this form" and it was clear they only cared about enterprise sized customers. which is a real shame because it was a great platform.

MPSimmons•28 minutes ago

What are you using to replace etcd here? Where is state stored?

throw2ih020•9 minutes ago

They implemented a store in TypeScript: https://github.com/ngrok/webernetes/blob/main/src/cluster/st...

etcd is not a requirement of k8s, plenty of clusters out there use non-etcd stores. E.g. k3s/k3d can use sqlite, all of the big cloud providers use their own in-house datastores instead of etcd.

duncangh•about 4 hours ago

Investing early in this hn post before it’s a banger. Instant classic

artisin•about 4 hours ago

It's Web Scale Technology™

srichard16•about 4 hours ago

100%

raychis•about 4 hours ago

First thing is first, this is really cool. This feels like the right way to frame LLM-assisted engineering. AI can generate a shocking amount of code, but the actual value is in the review discipline, and tests around it. The browser Kubernetes angle is cool, but what I find more interesting is the workflow, and especially testing behaviour against k8s instead of just trusting “looks right.” I do wonder how many teams are already doing this level of verification for AI-written code. It might be the direction everyone goes in over the next few years.

ambicapter•about 4 hours ago

I mean this is a specific case where you literally have a spec to code against. Not all coding endeavors have that opportunity, unfortunately.

samwho•about 2 hours ago

This is it. If you’re building something novel, and you want to rely on LLMs, you need to invest heavily in making tests. You don’t have the luxury of a reference implementation like I did here.

kridsdale1•about 4 hours ago

For a lot of us, the spec is Product Market Fit and Profit Dollars.

playorizaya•about 2 hours ago

1. It's not really running containers in the browser, right? It seems every service would need a custom connector - and more importantly...

2. ...would need a renderer, right? Otherwise what does it mean to be "ported to the browser"?

To use an analogy - if somebody ported DOOM to the browser, that means I can now play it in the browser. But I can't really run those databases that it shows in the browser tab, can I?

I couldn't say spin up ruby2d and suddenly have client-side Ruby support. It would require all sorts of custom work to get that actually running in a browser tab.

Where presumably with typical backend container services they really can port around and run anywhere.

So I don't see the point, and someone correct me if I'm wrong but it doesn't even seem to be what it asserts.

firesteelrain•about 2 hours ago

Your points are addressed in the post just not in the title.

It’s not running real container images. Maybe a better idea is simulated Kubernetes.

What’s ported is the control plane: scheduler, kube-proxy, deployment controller, etc, transliterated from the actual Go source and tested against k3s for behavioral parity using the same client API. The “rendering” is the demo app visualizing pod-to-pod requests as moving dots.

playorizaya•about 2 hours ago

Right, that's what I thought - still very cool!

Just a misleading title, I think.

It's not "k8s ported to the browser" so much as a web based monitoring tool.

Looks great, btw.

firesteelrain•about 2 hours ago

I don’t want to come across as diminishing OPs work. But it was alot of work to simulate what Kubernetes is doing.

tekacs•about 2 hours ago

First of all, this is wonderful stuff!

As a minor thought / question – I'm a little surprised that this isn't (yet) wired up for pods to run in Web workers.

I appreciate that there is a Clock mechanism (allowing you to step the cluster), which would be more difficult in that setup, but... I feel like especially with SharedArrayBuffer (which admittedly requires the right COOP/COEP), that could be pulled off with atomics.

Would be very cool to be able to actually thread in earnest with this design!

samwho•about 2 hours ago

Web workers were on my mind from the start but I never found myself needing them. They were always my ace-in-the-hole if this ended up being too CPU hungry on the main thread but it never happened, so I didn’t bother.

One of the fun things is it shouldn’t be too difficult to create a new RuntimeService that uses web workers and slots in alongside my existing CRI. I’d love a PR along those lines!

tekacs•about 2 hours ago

I definitely don't think that ordinary things would be too CPU-hungry on the main thread, but given how awkward it _can_ be to use the worker APIs, it would be a lovely abstraction to be able to treat workers as pods. I would love to run a CPU-hungry or WASM service on a worker as a pod and communicate with it over your take on CNI!

Similarly, when you move on to doing Volumes support, the browser's OPFS APIs can be synchronous from workers and only async from the main thread, so there are interesting possibilities around buffering/caching/using SharedArrayBuffer to accept-and-write extents that could be nice with workers. :)

If I get a spare moment, I'll absolutely take a look at PR-ing a runtime!

samwho•about 1 hour ago

I’m 100% confident it would be possible to do a worker-per-pod runtime. If you’re serious about trying to make it then slide into my DMs, would love to talk about it. I also think a CRI that supports WASM would be fairly easy.

Volumes are one of those things that I’m quite sure won’t be that difficult to implement but I don’t have a need for them in the near future, so likely won’t support them for a good while.

stackskipton•44 minutes ago

As SRE, Deployment, Replica Sets and Services are generally the easy part. The hard part which he noted:

>Right now, it doesn’t support ConfigMaps, Secrets, pod resources, persistent volumes, and a whole host of other things I haven’t needed yet. As I make more content with this library, I’ll implement more of what I need.

Yea, this is initial start to the madness followed by Ingress Controller and all little weird crazy stuff that Developers do that drive our lives crazy.

Also keeping these plates spinning while 100 devs are launching who knows what.

ImJasonH•about 3 hours ago

Relatedly, I vibecoded this a few days ago for fun: https://imjasonh.github.io/kubescheduler-the-game/

It was fun.

kube-system•about 2 hours ago

This game has got my name written all over it

jaggederest•about 4 hours ago

Perhaps to anticipate the multiple jokes about kube complexity, I think there's an interesting argument to make that something like kube is the necessary complexity level for the kinds of tasks that kube is intended to accomplish, ala Fred Brooks' rule about essential complexity vs accidental complexity.

Kube rapidly becomes accidental complexity when you use it to accomplish things that could be done more simply, of course.

malisper•about 3 hours ago

A meta-trend I find interesting is there's a lot of projects using AI to rewrite existing systems in new programming languages. Most often in Rust.

  1. Bun rewritten in Rust
  2. Flow rewritten in Rust
  3. The react compiler was rewritten in Rust
  4. Grit is a new implementation of Git in Rust
  5. I've made my own rust rewrite of postgres that passes 100% of the regression and isolation tests[0][1]

I think AI changed the economics of these projects even more than it has the economics for software engineering work in general. Though direct AI code translation is usually slop for me.

One of the many things I did to deal with this was an audit skill that would:

  1. Find a small chunk of code to rewrite
  2. Have a list of things that it was looking for in each piece of code that's being rewritten
  3. Place that next to the code being translated
  4. If that document didn't exist and/or didn't say the code was passing the audit, code wouldn't be merged
  5. As I found problems and anti-patterns I would add those to the skill over time

This by itself still let a lot of slop slip through, but also preemptively caught a ton of issues as part of my overall process.

Complicated old "boring" infra software might actually be the most AI-rewriteable code right now

[0] https://pgrust.com

[1] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust

ianm218•about 3 hours ago

I have been experimenting in this general area myself. I started by doing a port of Lua to Rust, then did Valkey to Rust using my Rust Lua for scripting, and now I've been working nginx in Rust.

I was thinking for all of these that the end goal is to take some existing technology and add some novel features rather than just X in Rust so what I have so far.

1. The Lua project bundles Lua 5.1 - 5.5 in one binary and one npm package so it's easy to run in the browser or CloudFlare Worker etc.

2. The Valkey (Redis) port builds something called EdgeStash - lets you run Valkey with Lua scripting in a CloudFlare Durable Object programmable with Lua scripting.

https://edgestash-valdr.ianmclaughlin1398.workers.dev/ that's a demo of the Edge Valkey node running.

I've been meaning to take take it and do something like yours that is sweet!

luka2233•about 3 hours ago

+1 CC helped me finally shipped a Rust project I had been sleeping on for years.

mcapodici•about 4 hours ago

This is awesome. Wish I had the idea first. I see this as a fun learning and experimental tool.

For a while I have wanted to make a web page where you can do service load balancing and queuing simulations so this would be a great basis for it.

samwho•about 2 hours ago

I have some potentially bad news for you:

https://samwho.dev/load-balancing https://encore.dev/blog/queueing

postalrat•about 4 hours ago

wasm should be the "image" type for webernetes

sighansen•about 4 hours ago

I wonder if stuff like this will also be created when token costs explode.

ianm218•about 3 hours ago

So your prior is that token costs are only going to go up. Doesn't stuff like GLM 5.2 and Deepseek change this? I.e. something close to Opus 4.5 that runs 10X + more performantly.

esseph•about 2 hours ago

No, because those loans still have to be repaid.

ianm218•about 2 hours ago

Could you explain your mental model of the situation a bit more?

Let's take something like GML 5.2 that is open source - anyone can run it on NVIDIA or AMD chips. People are currently making money by running GLM 5.2 Nvidia and AMD chips and selling inference on aggregators like openRouter.

So the cost to serve is like cost of Chip or financing for Chip + power and rackspace somewhere. We basically know that each year you will be able to server exponentially more inference per $ on Nvidia and AMD hardware as it gets to newer generations, so why would you expect the cost of inference on open models to also increase?

Like let's say not through a Chinese subsidized provider but like BaseTen https://www.baseten.co/pricing/ why would that get more expensive year over year?

croemer•30 minutes ago

No, they don't, they can also be defaulted on/written off. Open weights are there to stay, plus research, plus the GPUs, just the power needs to be paid.

There's a limit to price hikes due to competition, and open weights can't collude so closed weight companies don't have that much wiggle room to raise prices unless they are much better than open weights.

kridsdale1•about 4 hours ago

Yes, because you can buy infinity tokens for $10,000 with hardware.

antonvs•about 2 hours ago

People can and do still run local models.

artisin•about 3 hours ago

There's even a blog/article write-up with a more succinct demo of Kubernetes: https://ngrok.com/blog/i-ported-kubernetes-to-the-browser

   > Is this just slop?
   > Almost all of the webernetes code was authored by LLMs
   > ...
   > I did two things that I think make this a slop-free project:
   > 1. I reviewed every line of code.
   > 2. I created hundreds of tests that assert webernetes behaves the same as a real cluster.

edit: added the slop-free remarks

doctoboggan•about 4 hours ago

Interesting project and (possibly more) interesting explanation of the development process. I agree with the author that the primary difference between vibe slop and real engineering is just reading the lines of code. However it does feel like we are just on the cusp of only needing to read the tests and _not_ all the lines of code. Maybe a few more model generations and we will be there.

samwho•about 2 hours ago

For some projects I think only reading the tests is probably fine. In this project I didn’t think it was enough purely because it’s a port of existing code, so there was a need to validate the port was as exact as it could be.

Many projects would be just fine if you created a comprehensive-enough set of tests that you understood to be enough.

ianeff•about 4 hours ago

This is great!

frizlab•about 3 hours ago

And now for a fun game with this: try and delete all the pods!

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

https://xkcd.com/763/

>I'll often encourage BACKEND JAVASCRIPT DEVS to try to solve computer problems themselves by trial and error.

>However I've learned an important lesson: if they say the've sold their problem, never ask how.

syngrog66•about 3 hours ago

"Just because one can do a thing does not mean one should do that thing."

lstodd•about 4 hours ago

Please port Kubernetes to common house flies so that they drop dead out of all the unnecessary overhead. That would be helpful.

bryanrasmussen•about 4 hours ago

what will we port to the spiders whose population will otherwise surely explode?