kraken VS nerdctl

https://github.com/uber/kraken?tab=readme-ov-file#comparison...

"Kraken was initially built with a BitTorrent driver, however, we ended up implementing our P2P driver based on BitTorrent protocol to allow for tighter integration with storage solutions and more control over performance optimizations.

Kraken's problem space is slightly different than what BitTorrent was designed for. Kraken's goal is to reduce global max download time and communication overhead in a stable environment, while BitTorrent was designed for an unpredictable and adversarial environment, so it needs to preserve more copies of scarce data and defend against malicious or bad behaving peers.

Despite the differences, we re-examine Kraken's protocol from time to time, and if it's feasible, we hope to make it compatible with BitTorrent again."

Kraken seems unmaintained: https://github.com/uber/kraken/issues/313

For within your boundary of control, whether that be r/selfhosting, r/homelab, or enterprise a small registry or something like uber's kraken registry makes more sense.

First hit on Google is https://github.com/uber/kraken Did not know such thing exists.

Uber Engineering open-sourced Kraken [1], their peer-to-peer docker registry. I remember it originally using the BitTorrent protocol but in their readme they now say it is "based on BitTorrent" due to different tradeoffs they needed to make.

As far as I know there aren't any projects doing peer-to-peer distribution of container images to servers, probably because it's useful to be able to use a stock docker daemon on your server. The Kraken page references Dragonfly [2] but I haven't grokked it yet, it might be that.

It's also possible that in practice you'd want your CI nodes optimized for compute because they're doing a lot of work, your registry hosts for bandwidth, and your servers again for compute, and having one daemon to rule them all seems elegant but is actually overgeneralized, and specialization is better.

1 https://github.com/uber/kraken

If you're pulling big images you could try kube-fledged (it's the simplest option, a CRD that works like a pre-puller for your images), or if you have a big cluster you can try a p2p distributor, like kraken or dragonfly2.

Also there's that project called Nydus that allows starting up big containers way faster. IIRC, starts the container before pulling the whole image, and begins to pull data as needed from the registry.

https://github.com/senthilrch/kube-fledged

https://github.com/dragonflyoss/Dragonfly2

https://github.com/uber/kraken

https://nydus.dev/

Uber Kraken: Kraken is a P2P Docker registry capable of distributing TBs of data in seconds (URL: https://github.com/uber/kraken)

Might want to consider a private p2p solution like https://github.com/uber/kraken or similar.

Cost, availability, upkeep. Same as any other service. There are alternatives… https://github.com/uber/kraken

What about the docker-cli? colima also ships with a docker-compatible cli to interact with containerd called nerdctl. We can execute the same docker cli commands like:

Using nerdctl: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

I'd really disagree that compose files are somehow one-shot, or blindly modified. To the contrary, really, we have them checked in with the source code. Upon deployment to the cluster, the (running) services will be intelligently updated or replaced (in a rolling manner, causing zero downtime). LXC might be more elegant, but I have no idea what simple, file-based format I could use to let engineers describe the environment their app should run in without compose.

I need something that even junior devs can start up with a single command, that can be placed in the VCS along with the code, and that will not require deep Linux knowledge to get running. Open for suggestions here, really.

Now since Kubernetes works off of containerd I'll be taking a different approach on handling container builds by using nerdctl and the buildkit that comes bundled with it. I'll do this on the amd64 control plane node since it's beefier than my Raspberry Pi workers for handling builds and build related services. Go ahead and download and unpack the latest nerdctl release as of writing (make sure to check the release page in case there's a new one):

That's why nerdctl, their cli binary, is so well named.

Well, it is indeed a good option. However, containerd is a good alternative that is growing even among developers. Please see: https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

Nerdctl/containerd has IPFS support :)

https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl/blob/main/docs/ipfs.md

nerdctl supports IPFS for both image pulling and pushing, including encrypted images and eStargz lazy pulling. For building, the current method is a locally hosted translator so that the traditional pulls can be converted to work over IPFS. They even have docs on running it on k8s node, though if my reading is correct this isn't exactly a cloud native approach (running systemd services on each node...).