Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You might not need Kubernetes

blog.jessfraz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 319 posts

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#171

Post by codyb »

jerf wrote: post #132
wpietri wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who has his own colocated server (and has since Bubble 1.0), I definitely agree that the old-fashioned way still works just fine. On the other hand, I've been building a home Kubernetes cluster to check out the new hotness. And although I don't think Kubernetes provides huge benefits to small-scale operators, I would still probably recommend that newbs look at some container orchestration approach instead…

"5 years on, I know that I did a bunch of things for a bunch of reasons, but I don't really remember what or why." For my home servers, I've settled on "a default install of distro $X and an idempotent shell script that sets everything up for me". You have to use discipline to do everything in the shell script rather than simply fix the problem, but if you can do that, you end up with documentation as to how your ser…

Huh, I haven't found Docker to be a pain at all now that I sort of vaguely have an idea of what I do.

A docker file takes maybe ten minutes, and is really documentation more than anything.

That with a tmuxp yml file to set up a tmux session for developing can pretty much outline both how the product is released and how it's developed for anyone coming into the project.

Pretty neat, super easy, very cool.

I'm not really doing docker to say I'm doing docker but because once I realized how easy it is to containerize things it's not much more than a few steps to have a development environment as well as a production environment even for my crappy little website.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#172

Post by ori_b »

vidarh wrote: post #160
wpietri wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somebody who has his own colocated server (and has since Bubble 1.0), I definitely agree that the old-fashioned way still works just fine. On the other hand, I've been building a home Kubernetes cluster to check out the new hotness. And although I don't think Kubernetes provides huge benefits to small-scale operators, I would still probably recommend that newbs look at some container orchestration approach instead…

You can put everything in containers and still not need much orchestration, though. My personal projects run in dozens of containers, and the "orchestration" consists of a Makefile include pulled into each project that creates a systemd service file based on some variables, and pushes it into the right place. The service files will pull down and set up a suitable Docker container. The full setup for a couple of dozen…

> Of course it won't scale to massive projects

Most projects aren't massive -- at work, 2 years on, we're still using a single instance of a single node, with the only component that needs to be reliable stored as static files in S3.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#173

Post by TheDong »

m_mueller wrote: post #150
jerf wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"5 years on, I know that I did a bunch of things for a bunch of reasons, but I don't really remember what or why." For my home servers, I've settled on "a default install of distro $X and an idempotent shell script that sets everything up for me". You have to use discipline to do everything in the shell script rather than simply fix the problem, but if you can do that, you end up with documentation as to how your ser…

docker image definitions are idempotent as a matter of principle. creating an idempotent shell script is non trivial IMO - e.g. what return code is returned from package manager XY when something is already installed etc.

Really? What do your dockerfiles look like? Most of the ones I've seen in the wild look something like:

    FROM debian:jessie
    RUN apt-get install -y somepkg
    ...
What happens when the "debian:jessie" image changes (as it does weekly on dockerhub)? What about "somepkg" in debian's repositories?

The answer is that `docker build` will produce a different image. In fact, very few docker image builds I've seen are idempotent. They're not declarative, they're not reproducible, merely the output (the docker image itself) is itself able to be run reproducibly. The actual image definition, not so much.

Creating idempotent shell scripts is no harder than creating an idempotent dockerfile. Both are the same problem. A dockerfile is almost entirely the same as a shell script; it copies files around, it runs commands in an environment, and that's all.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#174

Post by ecoqba11 »

manigandham wrote: post #162
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…

It's not just about scaling. That seems to be the only thing people talk about because it sounds sexy but the reality is about operations. Kubernetes makes deployments, rolling upgrades, monitoring, load balancing, logging, restarts, and other ops very easy. It can be as simple as a 1-line command to run a container or several YAML files to run complex applications and even databases. Once you become familiar with th…

Exactly!

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#175

Post by tetha »

eropple wrote: post #104
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…

This is a little bit negotiable, but it's where I'd start considering Kubernetes: 1. at least six independent twelve-factor-app services with their own datastores and a need for high availability across all of them and a near-complete understanding of the high-availability interactions between instances of your services 2. an inability to predict ahead of time where your system's hot spots are, necessitating rapid sc…

> 4. an code-focused ops team (as opposed to a mouse-driven ops team) with extremely strong diagnostic skills and the bandwidth to babysit a service with a potential pain-in-the-ass ceiling around that of a Cassandra cluster

Here it is running fine... running fine.. running fine... aaaaand there's a compaction-and-gc cycle of death and fire and lost data and tears. Thank you for this terrible memory.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#176

Post by rcarmo »

If you’re looking for a simple way to manage web apps on Linux, check out https://github.com/rcarmo/piku

I wrote it as a sort of micro-Heroku/Dokku replacement to run on small ARM boards, and ended up deploying a few apps with it on Intel boxes (I also use Docker Compose, but for simple stuff it’s overkill).

It uses uWSGI and is heavily Python-oriented, but I’ve run other stuff on it (it’s basically a supervisor with automatic reverse proxy setup and a Procfile approach to specifying what to run - git push to it and you’re in business).

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#177

Post by eropple »

tetha wrote: post #175
eropple wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a little bit negotiable, but it's where I'd start considering Kubernetes: 1. at least six independent twelve-factor-app services with their own datastores and a need for high availability across all of them and a near-complete understanding of the high-availability interactions between instances of your services 2. an inability to predict ahead of time where your system's hot spots are, necessitating rapid sc…

> 4. an code-focused ops team (as opposed to a mouse-driven ops team) with extremely strong diagnostic skills and the bandwidth to babysit a service with a potential pain-in-the-ass ceiling around that of a Cassandra cluster Here it is running fine... running fine.. running fine... aaaaand there's a compaction-and-gc cycle of death and fire and lost data and tears. Thank you for this terrible memory.

I was going to say "we've all been there," but we haven't, and that's the deceptive thing about the five-minute-demo culture that a lot of "devops" has gotten into.

Everything is easy when it has nothing riding on it. When it isn't is where the value of a tool comes into focus.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#178

Post by derefr »

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…

> If it's high, is it because you are getting 100,000 requests per second, or is it the frameworks you cargo-culted in?

Mine's high because our business model involves blockchain stuff, and

1. blockchain nodes are CPU+memory+disk hogs;

2. ETL pipelines that feed historical data in from blockchains produce billions of events in their catch-up phase. (And we're constantly re-running the catch-up phase as we change parameters.)

Sadly, we need several fast servers even without any traffic :/

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#179

Post by taeric »

wpietri wrote: post #87
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…

As somebody who has his own colocated server (and has since Bubble 1.0), I definitely agree that the old-fashioned way still works just fine. On the other hand, I've been building a home Kubernetes cluster to check out the new hotness. And although I don't think Kubernetes provides huge benefits to small-scale operators, I would still probably recommend that newbs look at some container orchestration approach instead…

I'm curious how docker will help with the "5 years on" problem. I'd be willing to place money saying your docker setup for this week will have trouble running "as is" next month. Especially true for the vast majority of one-offs out there.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#180

Post by Enginerd3 »

Sahbak wrote: post #89

I honestly don't understand the amount of negativity towards dockers and kubernetes sometimes. All major cloud providers have a managed k8 service, so you don't have/need to learn much about the underlying system. You can spend a few days, at most, to learn about dockers, k8 configuration files and helm and you're pretty much set for simple workloads (and even helm might be overkill). Afterwards, deploying, testing,…

I honestly think this website's negativity towards stuff stems from not understanding use cases and being a general curmudgeon.

"All major cloud providers have a managed k8 service, so you don't have/need to learn much about the underlying system. You can spend a few days, at most, to learn about dockers, k8 configuration files and helm and you're pretty much set for simple workloads (and even helm might be overkill)."

This is the reason why I use k8s. It is ridiculously easy to deploy applications and I don't have to worry about hardening the VM.

Post reply on HN