31–40 of 57 posts
I have no idea if ML goes in the direction of K8s, but a lot of the field is.
As a side note, CKA equals to a very gentle getting started with Kubernetes. I have it, it's a fun way to learn, it's the equivalent of passing an undergrad-level 101 class (with the difference of CKA being objective-based).
k8s is a bad fit for most things, but people feel very happy using it, so might as well jump on board the bandwagon.
For small deployments (<20 instances) with a few services, ECS is far easier. Even though its annoying and opaque.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the alternative?
Package your software with any regular package manager (or even as a container image if you prefer), run it with systemd on a VM, manage with Ansible or any other config manager. Or use NixOS. Most things don't need autoscaling, and binpacking multiple services onto machines only starts to make sense if you can do it at a very large scale.
Correction - most things can't be autoscaled. I'll eat my hat if more than 25% of existing k8s clusters can even autoscale. Most will use PVC's and other stupid overengineered hoops to bind CPU to specific physical storage.
TLDR - k8s is just a painful enterprise thing to justify ops budgets for BigCorp. (Presumably, to counteract the fact that much of that budget went into "the cloud" lately.)
Define “worth it”
I define it as an opportunity cost to learning another technology or language that is in demand in the market. In other words, my perspective is from a career building (increasing total compensation, i.e. $) point of view.
That's the sort of thing that makes people really useful - not relying on another "infra" or (sigh) "devops" person to do the basics.
I'm biased I suppose - I run a self-hosting / home-hosting startup and we ship k8s on Raspberry Pis into users homes!
For ML it is good to know k8s to use it at a lower level via some DAG framework, such as Prefect.
My bet is that K8s will not only be worth learning in 2022, but also easily beyond. It is now a common infrastructure component of projects I participated in (some always used it, some are starting to). IMHO Kubernetes is quickly becoming the standard infrastructure API. Even if you don’t use all features, it’s just simpler to deploy a cluster and have everyone work on the same subset of abstractions. I am not sure i…
That's a lot of maintenance code one doesn't have to write and instances one doesn't have to manage.
The only thing I miss is a way to have a live debugging environment for developer or one that can be quickly started off local build outputs, then it'd be perfect.
If not then the question is "what for", and whether you will actually use it. I don't believe learning infrastructure tools for a potential new job is worth it, because there's so many flavors of it and every company is doing their own thing there anyway. Even if one ends up at Google, AWS or another big company chances are high something else than K8s is used - and not because K8s is already too old but just because they never onboarded to it and have other systems in place.