You might not need Kubernetes • Hacker News Board

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#261

Post by freehunter » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:44 AM UTC

shaklee3 wrote: post #256

tetha wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right now we're 4 weeks in and IT and 2 guys want it. We're 3 server nodes + 2 client nodes big, 128G RAM, 16 cores, 32 threads. Please go ahead and call this tiny and irrelevant. I'm aware and under the same assumption. I've dealt with individual servers around 4x that size. But, go ahead and ask me again in 3 or 6 month. We'll migrate around 10 HW servers as nomad clients, we'll probably get HW capacity from our si…

The problem is if you come on here and talk about how great nomad is, then only later say you are only running five nodes, that gives people false impressions. Kubernetes is tested regularly with 5000 nodes. To get to that level takes an entirely different level of software to be able to run a cluster that large reliably without issues.

Isn't the entire purpose of this threat that Kubernetes is a big solution made for big problems and smaller problems might not need that big of a solution?

The comment was in response to a question I asked about "do I really need something as big as Kubernetes". Not sure why people are picking apart this answer when it seems to answer my question quite well.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#262

Post by navinsylvester » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:56 AM UTC

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…

Hacker news running on a single server is a very bad precedent. Wish people running the show address it quickly since its being used as a bad example.

When building a business you should take care of having an environment which is resilient. I agree it's not for everyone. But its quite essential when you have a huge customer base and care about unpleasant experience. If someone is running an important business and leaving it to chance - its just pure arrogance or gross incompetence.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#263

Post by wpietri » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 1:58 AM UTC

Jedd wrote: post #182

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…

> The problem for me with the old big-server-many-apps approach is the way it becomes hard to manage. 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. I thought this was a solved problem. I use SaltStack for config management & orchestration on my own machines. (I suggest any config management tool becomes 'worth the effort' once you're managing more tha…

I agree that "virtual server" isn't a problem. Neither was "horseless carriage" or "radio with pictures". All of them were steps forward. But they're transitional states on the way to new paradigms.

When servers were expensive things that had full-time staff, the old ways of installing software made a lot of sense. But as server power got cheaper, they became impractical. A virtual server was at least familiar; slicing big machines up let us turn the clock back to when servers were less powerful. But that didn't really solve the problem, as we now had to do something to manage the explosion in the number of servers, real and virtual. Things like chef and puppet jumped in to solve this, but they are IMHO clumsy; it's all the work of managing a lot of servers the old way, even though it may be a small number of physical boxes.

Containerization says: Forget about installing apps on servers; just wrap the app up with what it needs. Things like Kubernetes takes that further, saying: Don't worry about which apps are running on which servers; it'll just work. The impedance mismatch between modern hardware and the 1970s-university-department paradigm that underlies Unix gets solved automatically.

I'm not sure if that's the end state in the paradigm shift. But I'm convinced that the approach to sysadminning I learned in the 1980s is on its way out.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#264

Post by james_s_tayler » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 2:20 AM UTC

curryst wrote: post #244

dcosson wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think from the perspective of getting things deployed, you're probably right. Kubernetes really shines there. I still think that a LAMP server is better for an average beginning developer because troubleshooting is significantly easier on a stock install. Stock installs of Kubernetes give you very few troubleshooting tools. I've had issues where CoreDNS stops responding, so some pods basically don't have DNS, and e…

I would say that it's still not a fully mature technology. As gaps become known new things emerge to plug those gaps. Istio springs to mind here in terms of making the networking and monitoring side of things easier.

The trend I see is that smaller and smaller teams are becoming capable of bigger and bigger things and when it comes to smaller apps that don't need it we're trading some complexity familiar to a large group of people (Kubernetes) for complexity known to only a handful or single individual (Bob's idempotent script for distro $X that only he knows the intricacies of).

I consider it fairly remarkable that a single developer today could accomplish, in terms of building and operating a system, what it would have taken a large team of specialists to do even 5 ~ 6 years ago let alone 10 years ago.

Now the OPs point is "you don't probably need it" and sure. Maybe you don't. But I would say watch how it shifts the economics of software development in the broader sense and especially over the next few years as the technologies mature.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#265

Post by shaklee3 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 2:24 AM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #261

shaklee3 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is if you come on here and talk about how great nomad is, then only later say you are only running five nodes, that gives people false impressions. Kubernetes is tested regularly with 5000 nodes. To get to that level takes an entirely different level of software to be able to run a cluster that large reliably without issues.

Isn't the entire purpose of this threat that Kubernetes is a big solution made for big problems and smaller problems might not need that big of a solution? The comment was in response to a question I asked about "do I really need something as big as Kubernetes". Not sure why people are picking apart this answer when it seems to answer my question quite well.

The purpose of this threads, and threads like it, is they turn into a "nobody needs kubernetes" when xyz exists, and they completely ignore the fact that kubernetes is not meant for small shops.

I didn't see yours was in the context of a small cluster, since I was reading the whole thread, so I apologize. It seems that every single comment is roughly the same as yours, though, and they act as if anyone who chose kubernetes/openshift is clearly an idiot. There's a reason big clusters use it, but the people running the large clusters don't come on HN to comment. Look at the openai blog, for example.

There's a reason the community is so large. There's a reason people are developing tons of tools around it.

It's not because they're stupid.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#266

Post by wilsonnb3 » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 2:25 AM UTC

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 did a programming project for a job interview recently at a company called Willowtree that makes iOS and Android apps for other companies.

It was a pretty simple project, basically wrap a rest API around some JSON data provided to you.

I ended up deploying mine to Google Cloud Platform onto a VM running Ubuntu and Apache, and they seemed rather concerned that I took that approach instead of leveraging some kind of containerization or PaaS approach.

My API definitely had problems, as I don’t have much back end experience, but I found it strange that they would look down upon deploying to a cloud VM. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that a VM hosted on AWS or Digital Ocean was the latest and greatest and it seemed like a logical choice for something that would only ever be used by about five people.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#267

Post by mharroun » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 2:41 AM UTC

martinlaz wrote: post #85

Yeah, but... Nobody ever got fired for using K8s.

I'm sure many startups and other companies have close by failing to hit their product goals and buisness kpi's.

Then again I guess that's not being fired... just picking technologies your company doesnt need that may ultimately kill everyone's jobs.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#268

Post by oftenwrong » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 3:13 AM UTC

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 convenient to be able to trivially create new production-like environments. Great for reproducing bugs or simulating deploys or running demos. My company's setup and scale doesn't necessitate kubernetes, but I still find it useful. It was fairly straightforward to set up.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#269

Post by Aeolun » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 3:14 AM UTC

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…

Given the limits of applications like flynn, deis and nomad, and having tried all of them, I would be inclined to point you towards just going full kubernetes (in specific, rancher 2.0).

It’s a fair amount of effort getting your head wrapped around kubernetes, but the same can be said for the other packages.

At least kubernetes seems more likely to be useful in your further career as well.

Re: You might not need Kubernetes

#270

Post by woolvalley » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 3:52 AM UTC

meritt wrote: post #133

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 someone who runs a very successful data business on a simple stack (php, cron, redis, mariadb), I definitely agree. We've avoided the latest trends/tools and just keep humming along while outperforming and outdelivering our competitors. We're also revenue-funded so no outside VC pushing us to be flashy, but I will definitely admit it makes hiring difficult. Candidates see our stack as boring and bland, which we ma…

To me the biggest red flag there is the php. After developing with typed languages, a dynamic language is honestly a pain. Cron is easy to replace if needed.

Like I would feel much better if it was python, golang, java or C#. Javascript I feel like is the new PHP. Another issue is what I call the COBOL syndrome, where your career future isn't as great. You can still be a shop with a relatively good career future tech set that is old, but it has to be the 'right' old things unfortunately.

Do you at least use something like Hack to add types?