Mac Studio as a Kubernetes Compute Satellite

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My K3s cluster runs on six Intel NUCs. They’re great for the 50+ containers that make up my homelab — Plex, Home Assistant, Frigate, Paperless, the usual suspects. But they’re terrible at machine learning. Four Skylake cores and 32 GB of RAM per node doesn’t get you far when Immich wants to classify 80,000 photos or Frigate wants a vision model to describe who’s at your door.

The Mac Studio sitting under my desk — M1 Ultra, 64 GB unified memory — is the opposite problem. Absurd single-machine ML performance, but I don’t want to migrate my entire cluster to it. I want the K8s cluster to stay the control plane for routing, TLS, service discovery, and GitOps, while the Mac handles the heavy compute.

Ml on Rusty Bower

Mac Studio as a Kubernetes Compute Satellite