What Buddy Cluster is — and what it isn't

If you’ve never heard the word “Kubernetes” and don’t want to, you’re exactly who this is for.

What it gets you

Buddy Cluster takes a handful of small computers on your network and turns them into one cluster — a single thing you manage from one web page, instead of several machines you’d otherwise have to look after one at a time. From that one page you can:

• set up the first machine and add more to it,
• install applications from a catalog and run them,
• give a machine dedicated storage for the data your applications keep,
• publish an application to the Internet with real, working security, so people outside your network can reach it,
• keep every machine current, and step in cleanly when one needs attention.

The goal is that you never have to open a terminal, never have to edit a configuration file by hand, and never have to find out what any of the technology underneath is actually called. Under the hood it is, in fact, a small Kubernetes cluster — but that’s the last time this page says so. Everywhere else, it’s your machines, your apps, your data.

What it isn’t

• It isn’t a command line tool. Everything above happens from the web panel. If a page ever asks you to type a command into a terminal, that’s the exception, not how the product normally works — and it will say so plainly when it happens.
• It isn’t a general-purpose cloud console. There’s no sprawl of unrelated settings to get lost in. Every screen answers “is everything OK?” before it offers you anything to do, and anything that needs your attention is shown to you, not hidden behind a menu you’d have to know to open.
• It isn’t tied to being in one place today. All the machines in a cluster currently need to sit on the same local network — the same building, the same router. Machines spread across different sites or reached only over the wider Internet aren’t supported yet.
• It isn’t a Raspberry Pi product, even though small, inexpensive boards are a common and well-supported choice for the machines you use. What matters is what the panel does for you, not which board is doing it.

What’s next

Continue to What you need to check your hardware and network against the requirements before you start.