replace lab desktops with Kubernetes (Hydra 2.0)

[nikhiljha]

Details

Just did a trial run of @tinyzimmer's kVDI on monsoon. I'm 400 miles away and accessing it over TCP inside SSH Port Forwarding inside kubectl port-forward and it's STILL super fast and low-enough-latency. Probably not first-person-shooter ready but it's probably still better than Stadia.

So here's what we could do...

• Run chromium in kiosk mode on a bunch of Raspberry Pi 4s, replace all the desktops with them.
• Recycle the Desktops, and/or turn them into Kubernetes workers for now and recycle them later.

There are a few bugs, but they seem pretty minor. If we got people working on this we could probably get it production ready (TM) pretty quick.

Benefits

• All the benefits of Hydra
  • more frequent hardware updates for the lab
  • more preemptible spare compute resources for HPC
• one more step for Kubernetes world domination
• people can pick their own OS (if they want to use NixOS or something like @aaronjanse)
• people who need more compute resources on the desktops can request it easily

[kpengboy]

What would the USB device support story be?

[tinyzimmer]

What would the USB device support story be?

It wouldn't be impossible, but would be tricky to implement at first. There are some unrelated UI bugs that still need ironing out for sure, including one someone posted over on the repo. Unfortunately I'm much more of a backend guy so those pieces take a little more time for me. I'm also at a new job and corona restrictions are lighter so I don't have as much free time as before.

USB devices plugged into the host running kVDI could actually be pretty easy and mostly backend related. Doing it from the client side would be a little more involved obviously, but not impossible.

[ethanhs]

I think this would be awesome, but we'd probably want client USB support before we could deploy this.