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Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#131

Post by zer0tonin »

rahen wrote: post #57

Kubernetes can really help bringing more scalability. All you need is to rewrite your application (think microservices), reduce cold latency (get rid of anything VM based such as Java, or rewrite in Spring or Quarkus), use asynchronous RPC, and decouple compute and storage. Then you need an elastic platform, for instance Kubernetes, with all the glue around such as Istio, and Prometheus, and Fluentd, and Grafana, Jae…

There's no problem with running a java monolith in k8s. Elasticity isn't the only benefit to using k8s. And you should probably be running Jenkins and Prometheus even if your whole infra was launched with `docker run`.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#132

Post by throwaway894345 »

n_e wrote: post #109
picozeta wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually my point. If Kubernetes does indeed provide the best solution to provide scalability and availability, one can argue that this would result in a decreased demand for dev ops engineers, as they "would just have to use Kubernetes" and it would decrease their workload. In reality this does not seem to be the case, that's why I asked.

> If Kubernetes does indeed provide the best solution to provide scalability and availability, one can argue that this would result in a decreased demand for dev ops engineers, as they "would just have to use Kubernetes". I'd say it would result in either: - the same scalability and availability with fewer DevOps engineers - better scalability and availability with a similar number or more DevOps engineers In my expe…

Right. Most companies aren't content to settle for doing the same thing they were doing but with fewer engineers when they realize they could be using those other engineers to automate even more things (via Kubernetes operators).

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#133

Post by jmillikin »

jmillikin wrote: post #112
throwaway787544 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but instead that operational load of running in-house software should be borne primarily by the developers of that software Go back and read a few DevOps books and blogs by the founders of it. We will always need separate disciplines for dev and ops, just like we need mechanical engineers and mechanics/racecar drivers. But we need them to work together and communicate better to solve problems better and not throw d…

My second job in large-scale software was at Google, which used the "DevOps model" since before DevOps was named. I have no need to read a blog on it. You want the person who designs the car to know what a car is , and to be able to diagnose basic issues like "the fuel gauge says 'empty' and engine won't start". And there's no analogy to an Indy car driver in software, every distributed system is self-driving. The mo…

throwaway787544 deleted their reply to this post. My response was as follows:

---

  > So you're familiar with Six Sigma then? Value stream mapping? TPS?
  > W.E. Deming? Martin Fowler? There's more to DevOps than deployments
  > and CI/CD.
None of those have any relationship to DevOps.

  > I haven't worked at Google, but I expect somebody gave you some tools
  > and some access to cloud infra and said "good luck".
I was on Borg-SRE. My job was to build the tools and maintain the cloud infra.

  > If you're lucky there was a small army of ops people behind the
  > scenes keeping things running for you
The point of having an SRE team is to avoid having a "small army" of ops people. Manual operation of compute infrastructure is uneconomical at scale.

  > if you weren't lucky you were expected to know how to correctly build
  > and run complex systems at scale by yourself
Google does expect its developers to understand basic principles of distributed systems, yes.

  > > every distributed system is self-driving
  >
  > I didn't know Google was in the bridge selling business.
What I mean is that when your service runs 24/7 and downtime is reported in the New York Times, there is no room for manual action during normal operation. The system must have the capacity to maintain itself and self-recover.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#135

Post by throwaway7865 »

belter wrote: post #129
throwaway7865 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally a one-liner for AWS EKS: eksctl create cluster --name mycluster --region us-west1 --with-oidc --fargate --external-dns-access --asg-access --full-ecr-access --alb-ingress-access

That is a quick and short line. Now the fun starts:"Kubernetes Failure Stories" https://k8s.af/

I’ve made a comment below, but long story short we’ve moved to Kubernetes running on Fargate and we don’t have downtime anymore.

Sure, one can break anything, but our anecdotal experience is we’re now focused on actually delivering code rather than fretting about node failures.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31581372

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#136

Post by sgarland »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #122
Avalaxy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice I don't agree. I spun up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, which was indeed easy. But then I had to figure out how to write the correct deployment scripts to deploy my docker containers to it, and how to configure all the security stuff. After more than a week of tryin…

You're not dumb, you're just new to it, and it's fundamentally hard stuff anyways, and if you can find a higher-level abstraction that lets you get work done faster, then all the better. However, the question is comparing Kubernetes to traditional VM-based infrastructure (especially with pet nodes) whereas you're comparing Kubernetes to a higher-level abstraction. For what it's worth, deploying in Kubernetes is prett…

Please, do not manage deployments with imperative kubectl commands, I beg of you.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#138

Post by wasmitnetzen »

nine_k wrote: post #96
caymanjim wrote: post #14

The premise of your question is invalid. Have you ever tried setting up a Kubernetes cluster and deploying apps in it? Kubernetes doesn't save work, it adds work. In return, you get a lot of benefits, but it wasn't designed to reduce human work, nor was it designed to eliminate devops jobs. It was designed for scalability and availability more than anything. Most people using Kubernetes should be using something simp…

It's a good point: tools made by giants for giants, such as Kubernetes, Bazel, etc, may not make sense for a smaller operation. But what would you suggest in lieu of Kubernetes? What would save work for a shop which is not yet a giant but has already overgrown the capabilities of 2-3 manually managed boxes / instances? I can think of several options. Management by Ansible / Saltstack / Chef can easily become a rabbit…

We run Nomad with about 7 to 9 client instances in prod. Quite happy with it.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#139

Post by neurostimulant »

Avalaxy wrote: post #101
planetafro wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know my dude, all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice. I agree with some other comments in this thread about a general fervor in the Enterprise space to "modernize" needlessly. This conversation usually lands on the company copying what everyone else is doing or what Gartner tells them to do. Cue "D…

> all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice I don't agree. I spun up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, which was indeed easy. But then I had to figure out how to write the correct deployment scripts to deploy my docker containers to it, and how to configure all the security stuff. After more than a week of tryin…

I feel you. Took me 2 years of dabbling with k8s every once in a while on the side to finally "get" it. and if I stop looking for a few months, suddenly it already gained another set of features and deprecating some other.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#140

Post by jeffwask »

jstream67 wrote: post #52
dusanh wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking as someone who has only tipped his toes into devops lately and is looking to learn K8, what is considered a reasonable "lightweight" alternative to Kubernetes these days?

If you are on AWS you should check out ECS Fargate (serverless). It is really really good. Probably one of their more polished products. If you want to stay on the Kubernetes route check out k3s. Super easy to setup and usable for small production workloads

I second this. There are a few limitations in Fargate that are annoying but overall it's solid and easy to use.
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