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You might not need Kubernetes

blog.jessfraz.com

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Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#91

Post by jeletonskelly »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
beagledude wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but what if? Imagine.

I imagine if you have an ops team, they're going to continue to pray every time you have to upgrade k8s or a supporting underlying service and the expectation is that everything will continue to function without dropping an inbound request. I imagine they are going to be less than impressed being on call for something that is essentially still in beta. And if you have no ops and your devs are responsible for it, god…

Man, I wish I could give you more upvotes for this sentiment. Making the decision to put the livelihood of a company on any platform is not to be taken lightly. As an SRE I feel like I have to take a slightly conservative approach to new technologies.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#92

Post by cat199 »

sk5t wrote: post #79
segmondy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4-8 dedicate staff members to run k8s? seriously, How did you come up with that number? 1) You can run k8s hosted on Google, DigitalOcean with zero effort. 2) I built a k8s cluster in 3 days with zero experience after spending a week playing with minikube, reading the docs are kuberentes.io

And you feel like you understand the warts and pitfalls, suitable to keeping a mission-critical service running once the circuit breakers start to trip, based on 3-8 days of experimentation?

well, not the op, but i googled 'kindly pls to fix a kubernetes software on the RHEL servers' and I got this in a forum post:

    $ sudo apt-get install fix-muh-k8s && sudo fix-muh-k8s || reboot
so I think i'm good to go, thankyouverymuch.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#94

Post by maxerickson »

kayoone wrote: post #81
citilife wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference, this runs on a $5 AWS instance: https://hnprofile.com/ The database is $600 per month, but that data runs five different websites (and it's a few hundred Gb of data). EDIT: for those mentioning the 502 gateway error, it does auto scales - Now it's costing more per month, at least temporarily.

$5 AWS instance ? aren't they all substantially more than that ?

Nope.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#95

Post by vander_elst »

As much as I agree with the fact that for 95% of the cases k8s is not needed, the problem most likely lies in the overengineerin around it. Take a managed k8s solution setup a deployment that serves through an ingress controller. Done.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#96

Post by eropple »

bashmonkey wrote: post #68

I do my level best to stay away from containers. I don't think most people even need them. It's a fad of sorts. I tend to stick with the tried and true and not follow trends, cloud or otherwise. Nothing worse than having your data on someone else's HW and losing connectivity through no fault of your own. Years ago, I worked for UUNET in Reston/Ashburn, VA, and built web servers and the attendant HW/SW that ran them (…

Containers and container orchestration are wildly different, though. A container is a pretty handy way to distribute an app to a production environment. Container orchestration is a bad application of the bin packing problem. Pretty different things.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#97

Post by tetha »

freehunter wrote: post #6

Maybe someone here can help me figure out what I need, since the world of containers is growing faster than I can understand. I have one code base that I run on multiple servers/containers independently of each other. Think Wordpress style. I used to run it on Heroku but I switched to Dokku because it's substantially cheaper and I don't mind taking care of the infrastructure. I like Dokku but I do worry about being t…

Kubernetes isn't the only thing around. Kubernetes and Mesos are kinda the heavyweight solutions, but there are smaller things around like Hashicorps Nomad and Swarm, and probably a lot more I don't know.

We're currently evaluating nomad, and it's surprisingly pleasant. Nomad doesn't solve every problem every application in every situation might have. Nomad schedules containers, VMs or whatever else on hosts. This reduces complexity a lot.

It took us like 1 - 2 man-weeks to have an almost arbitrarily scalable nomad setup which allows you to submit a bunch of jobs and mark some public ports for a loadbalancer, be it mysql, http, whatever. And it's easy to understand and operate. There's 3 nodes of consul, 3 nodes of nomad-server and 2 hosts of nomad-client, some certs in the middle, consul-template + haproxy with a config almost from a blogpost. That's it. It has very few moving parts and it's easy to understand and troubleshoot with 2-3 main guys in our ops team. (EDIT: this doesn't read clear. We have 2-3 guys on our ops team. They are not working on nomad alone. Nomad atm is a low-maintenance system and we're mostly dealing with other crap /EDIT)

And now we're just going with it for now. Our CI needs resources for on-demand test-systems, so let's figure out how to make that happen. Our self-service test system for demos / manual acceptance testing needs resources for systems so let's figure that out. We might need to use gluster or something for persistent storage if we want to migrate internal tooling to this. A sister company might want to tinker around with windows VMs scheduled by nomad, or windows containers, so why not?

But the good thing: It took us 2 weeks to start delivering business value. That's a relatively small up-front payment for an established company, even a small one. Now we can leave it alone for some time, or we can invest some more well defined packages of time to make it better in concrete, requested ways. That's easy to schedule and prioritize.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#98

Post by dcosson »

combatentropy wrote: post #19

Some day I would like a powwow with all you hackers about whether 99% of apps need more than a $5 droplet from Digital Ocean, set up the old-fashioned way, LAMP --- though feel free to switch out the letters: BSD instead of Linux, Nginx instead of Apache, PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, Ruby or Python instead of PHP. I manage dozens of apps for thousands of users. The apps are all on one server, its load average around…

I really think that running a LAMP server for the average beginning developer these days would be just as complicated, maybe more complicated, than running a single deployment on Google Kubernetes Engine. You have to know about package managers and init systems and apache/nginx config files and keep track of security updates for your stack and rotate the logs so the hard drive doesn't fill up. If you already know how do this stuff in your sleep because you've done it for years, then yeah, don't fix what isn't broken. But if you're starting with no background, there's nothing inherently wrong with using a more advanced tool if that tool has good resources to get you started easily.

Just because there's more complexity in the entirety of the stack when running an orchestration system doesn't necessarily mean more complexity for the end user.

Side note - couldn't you make a similar argument about any kind of further abstraction? "Question for all you hackers out there - do you really need HTTP requests with their complicated headers and status codes and keepalive timeouts? I run several apps just sending plain text over TCP sockets and it works fine."

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#99

Post by kayoone »

bashmonkey wrote: post #68

I do my level best to stay away from containers. I don't think most people even need them. It's a fad of sorts. I tend to stick with the tried and true and not follow trends, cloud or otherwise. Nothing worse than having your data on someone else's HW and losing connectivity through no fault of your own. Years ago, I worked for UUNET in Reston/Ashburn, VA, and built web servers and the attendant HW/SW that ran them (…

problem with that mindset is that it will be harder to get hired. At least where i work, knowledge about containers and cloud services is pretty crucial to get a senior position in a bigger company.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#100

Post by fulafel »

l_t wrote: post #74
chess44 wrote: post #33

I am interested in people's opinion on the "break even point" between using Kubernetes and not using Kubernetes. Let's pretend that the only options are Kubernetes and something substantially less powerful. What is the simplest/easiest personal project where using Kubernetes might be justified? I am a junior software engineer trying to figure out how to contextualize all of these container/container management system…

IMO, Kubernetes is one of those things where if you have to ask, you don't need it. It's only really "justified" if you're actually using features like: - High availability services (more than one copy running at once). - Service discovery (services talking to each other in a resilient way). - Ability to automate operational tasks. - Rolling deployments of services. Very few personal projects will tick those boxes --…

If you need high availability, you get into the second order effects: consider the risk from the complexity of the HA setup, your lack of experience with its failure modes, and lack of low level access to the managed kubernetes service? If you are not a seasoned SRE, there are a lot of "unknown unknowns" for you waiting around the corner.
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