I wonder how hard it would be to port this over to a Karpenter variant. I suppose the Proxmox API won&#x27;t do the same things as an AWS EC2 API so an operator-in-the-middle would still be required.

I guess I just don&#x27;t get why you&#x27;d have such small k8s nodes in a cluster, I have a cluster about half that size (in node and core count) but just run k8s directly on the metal. It means that things are quite elastic with an HPA + VPA on things that need it. I feel like we get better overall utilization of the hardware, but I&#x27;d be interested in hearing about some of the reasons for your approach.Off the top of my head, there are probably a couple of &#x27;pros&#x27; to doing it your way; one: experimentation is probably easier. Two, I&#x27;m willing to bet networking isn&#x27;t anything too fancy (getting k8s to play nice on bare metal networks is a shitty thing, especially once multiple NICs are involved -- a LOT of networking stacks, ok, all of them, just &#x27;assume&#x27; that the first network card it sees is THE network card it should use... and don&#x27;t even bother to &#x27;sort&#x27; them so its the same order every reboot).

If your k8s nodes are the same height and width as your Proxmox servers, then yes. In my case, I have clusters of ~7 nodes, 100 cores, 1.75TB RAM, but my VMs tend to be much, much smaller. My web workers are each a handful of cores, I could double them a couple times before saturating the physical nodes core count.

Host resources might and should be overprovisioned, this ensures the k8s clusters you run on proxmox aren&#x27;t overprovisioned.

Won&#x27;t this just result in over-committing the physical nodes? Or am I missing something?

&gt; Thinly provisioned compute in the presence of other VMs is one reasonThat&#x27;s the only reason I can think of.&gt; I think this is aimed at people with multiple proxmox nodes in a clusterI think so too, but then we&#x27;re back to the original question again (i.e. why not just have kubernetes nodes instead of having proxmox nodes with kubernetes VMs on them).

Thinly provisioned compute in the presence of other VMs is one reason, but I think this is aimed at people with multiple proxmox nodes in a cluster.

Proxmox can also automatically provision zfs underneath, automatically set up ceph across nodes, has a nice ui for the firewall and more. Maybe the benefit is convenience.

Failover, green-blue upgrades, experimentation are 3 things that come to mind.

What is the benefit to running multiple Kubernetes nodes on one physical Proxmox machine?

I have heard of Proxmox but didn&#x27;t really know what it did, so I went to Wikipedia, which tells me: &quot;Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE or PVE) is a hyper-converged infrastructure open-source software.&quot;This is a little buzzwordy. I am also not sure that something can be &quot;a software&quot;.

Agreed, the title was pretty self explanatory.

I am a little tired of commenters lazily flinging this every time something in the infrastructure world comes up that they don&#x27;t fully understand. Something doesn&#x27;t become word salad just because you don&#x27;t know what it means.I might have problems understanding something -- say, &quot;Comparison of implementations of in-order traversal of an AVL tree in Scala v&#x2F;s Clojure&quot;; but that doesn&#x27;t mean it doesn&#x27;t have a clear and intelligible meaning to someone who gets it.In this case, I understand the idea here somewhat even without looking at the project. Kubernetes has very flexible auto-scaling capabilities. This seems to be be somehow allowing it to scale across a bunch of VMs hosted using Proxmox, which is an open-source VM hosting platform. There is no word salad about it.

Infrastructure and devops becomes more abstracted with every new word salad.

Show HN: kproximate – A Kubernetes node autoscaler for Proxmox