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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?

#91

Post by cestith »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #30

The short answer is: Because of Kubernetes. The longer answer is: When you switch to Kubernetes, you are introducing _a lot_ of complexity, which, depending on your actual project, might not be inherent complexity. Yes, you get a shiny tool, but you also get a lot of more things to think about and to manage, to run that cluster, which in turn will require, that you get more devops on board. Sure, there might be proje…

This is all true enough. The benefit of k8s is that if you need all that complexity, or even most of it, then k8s gives it to you in a fairly standard way. Then everything you build on top of it has a well-documented platform you can hire people to help maintain rather than having to train people for six months on a home-grown solution before they're productive.

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

#92

Post by belter »

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…

Anybody who watched "Kubernetes: The Documentary" knows the answer: https://youtu.be/BE77h7dmoQU

Kubernetes only exists, because Google lost the Cloud Wars, and this was their Hail Mary pass.

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

#93

Post by throwaway787544 »

jmillikin wrote: post #6

> 1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD > 2) external users: end users > > Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do > 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just > got more specialized). Both are called sysadmins. SRE is a specialized software engineering role -- you'd hire SREs if you wanted to create something like Kubernetes in-house, or do extensive customiza…

> 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 dead cats over walls.

You can of course give devs more powerful tools, more access and agency to enable them to develop the software better. Sentry.io is a great example of what is needed; makes everyone's life easier, devs can diagnose issues and fix bugs quickly without anyone in their way. That doesn't require operations work because it's just simplifying and speeding up the triage and debug and fix and test phases. It's the fundamental point of DevOps.

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

#94

Post by picozeta »

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…

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.

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

#96

Post by nine_k »

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 hole comparable to maintaining K8s's YAML. In your experience, does Nomad save SRE work at smaller scales? Does Terraform? CloudFormation?

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

#97

Post by blue_cookeh »

jmillikin wrote: post #33
binarymax wrote: post #29

Kubernetes is a Google scale solution. Lots of teams said “hey if Google does it then it must be good!”…but forgot that they didn’t have the scale. It caught on so much that for whatever reason it’s now the horrendous default. I’ve worked on at least 3 consulting projects that incorporated K8s and it slowed everything down and took way too much time, and we got nothing in return - because those projects only needed s…

Kubernetes can't (currently) scale to Google sizes. It's designed for small- or medium-sized businesses, which might have 50,000 VMs or fewer. There are entire SaaS industries that could fit into a single Google/Facebook/Amazon datacenter.

> small- or medium-sized businesses, which might have 50,000 VMs or fewer

Holy shit, is this considered small to medium enterprise now?

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

#99

Post by ec109685 »

jmillikin wrote: post #33
binarymax wrote: post #29

Kubernetes is a Google scale solution. Lots of teams said “hey if Google does it then it must be good!”…but forgot that they didn’t have the scale. It caught on so much that for whatever reason it’s now the horrendous default. I’ve worked on at least 3 consulting projects that incorporated K8s and it slowed everything down and took way too much time, and we got nothing in return - because those projects only needed s…

Kubernetes can't (currently) scale to Google sizes. It's designed for small- or medium-sized businesses, which might have 50,000 VMs or fewer. There are entire SaaS industries that could fit into a single Google/Facebook/Amazon datacenter.

That’s a bit out of date. K8s can do 5,000 nodes and 300k VMs within its performance envelope: https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg...

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

#100

Post by belter »

cgdub wrote: post #86
globular-toast wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, obviously it was designed to reduce human work. A tool that adds work wouldn't be very useful, would it?

A tool or technology that adds work is extremely useful. More work means - more employees needed - more direct reports for managers - more jobs for x technology - more people learning x technology because of those jobs - more StackOverflow questions for x - more companies using x technology because it's "easy to hire for" - more money to be made in teaching x - more learning material for x

Seen before :-)

https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm

Warning to bashers...it's a fake interview...

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