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

The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

tech.paulcz.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–128 of 128 posts

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#121

Post by romeisendcoming »

pbalau wrote: post #113
romeisendcoming wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like classic devops/cloud snake oil. I wonder what industry pays your bills? * The most businesses/always on reasoning appeals to executive decision makers and rolls down hill to the technical people who are best educated to make the decision. Many people who believe that you can cut cost by sizing workloads end up racing their own models when it doesn't scale financially or computationally over time. * W…

> Yes, monopolies are healthy. Seems all 3 major cloud providers, aws, google and azure, are providing facilities to run docker containers. Seems Digital Ocean is getting there too. Hardly a monopoly, init? > What is so difficult about hardware? All of it. This is knowledge my company doesn't have and there is no point in investing in accuiring this knowledge at this time, since we have an easier solution. Not to men…

Let me assist you with your English by being (over) explicit and adding overt punctuation to outline the objectionable excerpt. -- The '..most businesses/always on..' reasoning appeals to executive decision makers and rolls down hill to the technical people who are best educated to make the decision. Many people who believe that you can cut cost by sizing workloads end up racing their own models when it doesn't scale financially or computationally over time. --

All of hardware is too hard until (evidently) you run out of options from 'ze cloud' and you live in a PC bubble that doesn't like snark. Noted. You sound like a senior SV architect.

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#122

Post by rhinoceraptor »

nimbius wrote: post #36
mcguire wrote: post #33

As someone who has been a sysadmin and system programmer for 25 years and a crusty rat bastard for almost that long, I have to wonder how long it is going to be until someone realizes that a piece of hardware doing a task is more efficient than 27 layers of virtual machines and a long pair of tongs.

amen. At first i figured containers were a good way to run code with difficult dependencies and weird operating environments, but that still doesnt make sense. - systemd and uwsgi for example play well when run as a single user per wsgi application under a single nginx/lb. - php-fpm already handles a ton of overhead from php apps. - ansible deployments called from gitlab-ci can roll out apps just as well as deploying…

I don't think most developers or admins really have the toolset/skills to debug to root cause. Most people see debugging as the process of making problems go away, not as the science of understanding a problem.

You need both developer and admin skills, as well as a pretty good understanding of the whole stack - the application, the framework/libraries, the application runtime/support libraries, the database, the kernel and the network.

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#123

Post by TuringTest »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #116
TuringTest wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt a home-made solution to load balancing will be seen as simpler , which is what's being argued by the comment I replied to. The point isn't that you need Kubernetes specifically, it's that requiring a system that scales well is not as uncommon as the OP puts it.

k8ts is not the only avenue to building scalable systems -- scaling is mostly about architecture, not how you run your software.

> k8ts is not the only avenue to building scalable systems

I had already conceded that. What's your point?

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#124

Post by hedora »

013a wrote: post #59

I really worry about cost in this future of leaning on something like ACI/Fargate to actually run the containers. An m5.large instance (2vcpu/8gb) costs $70/mo on-demand ($44/mo with a 1 year reservation). A similar Fargate runtime costs $146/mo. A b2ms Azure instance (2vcpu/8gb) costs $60/mo on-demand ($39/mo 1 year reservation). Azure Container Instances at a similar provisioning level costs $176/mo by my calculati…

Also, the instance prices are already some crazy multiple of buying a machine, racking it, and running dozens of VM’s on it for 5 years.

I don’t know the prices for hyperconverged or converged infrastructure off the top of my head, but doubt the amazon rates are even close to competitive unless you’re at a tiny scale (or need a ton of tiny presences in different regions).

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#125

Post by jskaggz »

Annatar wrote: post #95

And people still wrangle with this... how can it be easier to struggle like this than learn how to use SmartOS and Triton? Kubernetes is a solution to severe OS virtualization deficiency in Linux, most notably orchestration. You, know, the problem which is non-existant in SmartOS with Triton and large scale configuration management with operating system packages. Every so often this hits "Hacker News" and people will…

At the risk of tarnishing my reputation amongst the hacker news docker/kubernetes hypecycle elite, have an upvote. The I.T. industry in general is funny. New technologies come and go like pop stars. Docker == ke$ha, Kubernetes == ice cube, triton is fred astaire. They all have their off moments. I personally like my platform stable, performant, secure, and boring. If I spent all of my time keeping up on the latest trends on how to spin up machines, I'd have little time to work on actual product. Something good will come out of this influx of cash, marketing, and cloud sales, eventually. Fits and starts. /me goes back to coding and deploying on triton, while patiently watching the docker/kubernetes show.

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#126

Post by Annatar »

jskaggz wrote: post #125
Annatar wrote: post #95

And people still wrangle with this... how can it be easier to struggle like this than learn how to use SmartOS and Triton? Kubernetes is a solution to severe OS virtualization deficiency in Linux, most notably orchestration. You, know, the problem which is non-existant in SmartOS with Triton and large scale configuration management with operating system packages. Every so often this hits "Hacker News" and people will…

At the risk of tarnishing my reputation amongst the hacker news docker/kubernetes hypecycle elite, have an upvote. The I.T. industry in general is funny. New technologies come and go like pop stars. Docker == ke$ha, Kubernetes == ice cube, triton is fred astaire. They all have their off moments. I personally like my platform stable, performant, secure, and boring. If I spent all of my time keeping up on the latest tr…

That was a big risk you took. You have guts for standing up to the hype machinery.

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#127

Post by peterwwillis »

rantanplan wrote: post #94
peterwwillis wrote: post #84

I'm convinced that Kubernetes is very good for job security, and not much else. Unless you're a managed services host, you should probably not be running it. Please, for the love of all that is holy, use a cloud services provider if you need K8s-style service features. If you don't, then just cobble together your infrastructure in the simplest way possible that uses DevOps principles, methods and practices.

Could you elaborate a bit?

K8s is a very complex system. And the more complex the requirements, the more complex one needs to make K8s through additional software that isn't baked in. Complex systems are costly to run, but more importantly, they're costly to maintain due to the typical level of service required, the number of employees needed to maintain it, and the amount of specialized knowledge required. The system is also under constant maintenance due to its short release cycle. Basically, you need to build an entire cloud services team just to keep it running smoothly. (not for "test labs", but for real production services) And on top of all this, if you're running it on your own hardware, you don't even get the benefit of reduced infrastructure costs.

Because this is not only hard to get right, but very costly, it is much cheaper and easier to pay someone to do all this for you. It is almost guaranteed that doing it yourself will not give you any significant advantage, cost savings, or increased development velocity.

On top of this, most people don't even need k8s. K8s is a containerized microservice mesh network. If you don't need containers and you aren't running microservices, you may be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Even if you did need k8s, the benefit may be small if you don't have complex requirements.

Most people can get high-quality, reliable end results with simple, general-purpose solutions using DevOps principles and tools. If you're not Google or Facebook, you probably just need immutable infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, logging, continuous integration/deployment, and maybe autoscaling. You don't need an orchestration framework to deliver all that. And by going with less complex implementations, it will be easier and more cost-effective to maintain.

At the end of the day, if you need k8s, use it. But I really worry about most people who hop on the k8s bandwagon because they see a lot of HN posts about it, or because Google touts it.

Re: The future of Kubernetes is virtual machines

#128

Post by jskaggz »

Annatar wrote: post #126
jskaggz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of tarnishing my reputation amongst the hacker news docker/kubernetes hypecycle elite, have an upvote. The I.T. industry in general is funny. New technologies come and go like pop stars. Docker == ke$ha, Kubernetes == ice cube, triton is fred astaire. They all have their off moments. I personally like my platform stable, performant, secure, and boring. If I spent all of my time keeping up on the latest tr…

That was a big risk you took. You have guts for standing up to the hype machinery.

I'm still fighting the sneaking suspicion that putting kubernetes/etc out to the general public and having such a fast release cycle was just a genius play by the big cloud vendors to acquire customers (who will realize running this stuff on premises isn't as cheap as they thought it was after doing the math (all the math, security, training, operational expenses, personnel training/expenses, moving from docker->moby->rkt->gvisor->firecracker->now vm expenses, blah blah etc)). This current tech wave is kind of disheartening. Everybody is focused on hosting...can we not get icecube to play a show for folks that are pushing the envelope with technology as applied to the medical field, or saving the environment, yo?

Triton on-prem is a snap. Boot the headnode from usb, boot the cluster nodes from usb+pxe, and lets get to kicking ass, fighting the good fight focusing on real groundbreaking applications.

*edit: I'm still a little butt-hurt after kubernetes being rammed down my throat in a large enterprise environment. Apologies to those that are fighting the good fight with kubernetes, I know you're out there, and big high 5 :)

Post reply on HN