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Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

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Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#191
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudformation is a tragedy in itself.

The idea behind CloudFormation is great, though. Platform-native IAC with promised first party support for all future projects, and backfilling existing services. Plus, it supports deep integrations with first-party supported configuration management services. The problem is that the reality has not lived up to the promise, and "first party support" means "only the first party can support".

CloudFormation is a declarative state management language and framework just like Terraform. The problem is that CF abstracts said state away from you to the degree that you can't hack around it and you wind up forcibly deleting resources if you try to use it like a configuration management framework. With CF Custom Resources you can add all sorts of other stuff and that's pretty cool at least.

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#192
post #13

The article seems to focus on K8s with reference to micro-services. How well does K8s do if you're running a monolith?

All of the following assumes you plan on running more than a single instance of your monolithic application. If that's not the case, then ignore Kubernetes, and be glad you don't have the problems it was designed to solve. If you consider what it takes to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a single application, monolith or micro-service, you need a solution for the following items: deployments, application configurat…

"I don't recommend rolling your own Kubernetes cluster either. You should strongly consider leveraging a fully managed Kubernetes offering such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Digital Ocean's Managed Kubernetes, or Azure Kubernetes Service."

Working for one of those vendors. There is no cloud, just someone's else computer.

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#193

AWS employee here--thoughts and opinions are my own. Prior to AWS, I was in IT Operations at a large financial services company. I saw the writing on the wall that over time, companies would not want to manage this part of their IT infrastructure themselves. Keep in mind, I was someone who was responsible for keeping the lights on for a decent number of Linux severs. For an individual company, there really isn't much…

Yeah, I think the other factor that seems to be missed here is access to security patches for the hardware/frmware and OS. If you look at recent history with even the CPU attacks over the last few years Amazon and MS had access to the issue and vender workarounds months before even other large cloud players did. Digital ocean and other very large players were left holding the bag when the announcements were made with very short windows to get their systems up to speed. Consumer level onprem were waiting sometimes months for the patches/firmware and software to be available.

Not saying at all that is how it SHOULD BE, but if you are planning on pulling back to onprem (or colo) it should be a concern as it is a hard to mitigate risk.

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#194

AWS employee here--thoughts and opinions are my own. Prior to AWS, I was in IT Operations at a large financial services company. I saw the writing on the wall that over time, companies would not want to manage this part of their IT infrastructure themselves. Keep in mind, I was someone who was responsible for keeping the lights on for a decent number of Linux severs. For an individual company, there really isn't much…

Yeah, I think the other factor that seems to be missed here is access to security patches for the hardware/frmware and OS. If you look at recent history with even the CPU attacks over the last few years Amazon and MS had access to the issue and vender workarounds months before even other large cloud players did. Digital ocean and other very large players were left holding the bag when the announcements were made with…

correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought basically all recent exploits (including spectre/meltdown) were only really viable on shared hypervisors?

so while yes, there weren't any fixes for your onprem virtualizers -- there also wasn't any immediate danger as the attacker had to compromise one of your nodes before actually using these attack vectors...

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's an example of a dedicated provider? I also worked in ITOps at a medium-ish company and we were moving our colo to Azure, when I left.

Rackspace

The guys that are selling managed services on AWS?

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#196
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kinda annoying how the valid criticism of cloud solutions is getting drowned out by criticism on strawmen. Who exactly is saying that no one can afford their own infra anymore? What some people say is that cloud is usually cheaper than running your own infra. They may be wrong (I'm doubtful myself), but it's a wholly different argument.

It usually takes the form of "ugh then you have to hire dedicated people to manage it."

You don't just have to hire dedicated people. You also have to manage those people effectively.

That tends to lead to the typical old-style IT organization which is nowhere near as responsive to the needs of the business as it could be, and this is a competitive disadvantage.

The value proposition of cloud is much more than just technical. Engineers who don't understand why cloud is "winning" are focusing on the wrong factors. The technical aspect is only a part of the picture.

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15A is more than you think these days, still probably need more for a full rack but a modern server can draw around 150W under full load these days. Hell, my entire rack at home hangs around ~.3A during normal usage (2x Dell R210 II's, Dell R320, Dell R520, Lenovo SA120 with 4 bays filled, Juniper EX2200-48T, Mikrotik CRS317).

Can I ask you what do you use all those servers for? Looks like a not-so-small office rack config

FreeNAS for media and VM storage on the R320+SA120.

The R520 runs Proxmox and hosts whatever stuff I’m playing with at any given time along with Kubernetes, FreeIPA, Graylog2, probably my mailserver again soon, etc.

One R210 II runs Sophos XG to handle router+security duties, the other runs Windows Server Essentials 2016 for AD and NPS.

The CRS317 switch provides 10Gb networking for storage on a couple of servers, and everything else is connected to the EX2200.

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rackspace

The guys that are selling managed services on AWS?

They sell all of those those things. RS has their fingers in many pies, even though some of them appear to conflict at first glance.

Re: Rolling your own servers with Kubernetes

#200
post #176

AWS employee here--thoughts and opinions are my own. Prior to AWS, I was in IT Operations at a large financial services company. I saw the writing on the wall that over time, companies would not want to manage this part of their IT infrastructure themselves. Keep in mind, I was someone who was responsible for keeping the lights on for a decent number of Linux severs. For an individual company, there really isn't much…

What seems to often go unsaid in these discussions is that the choice isn't between cloud and colo. There's a third, hugely popular and mature option: dedicated providers - which address all of your issues. It's convenient for cloud vendors to have people believe the choice is between them or having to deal with hardware.

But isn't dedicated providers a subset of cloud providers? I can see how having a focused provider with a narrow mission might be beneficial in some cases, but I can't say it's that much of an advantage compared to the ecosystem & convenience of a cloud provider.
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