Live data from Hacker News

Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

blog.tilt.dev

11–20 of 87 posts

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#11
I think the author is doing it wrong personally. Just spin up a real dev cluster and use that? Why putz around with setups on your laptop? That’s never going to scale team-wise? And if you damn well insist on running your own local k8s cluster for development then the whole thing should be automated infrastructure as code anyways that you start with a command so that other developers will get the same behavior.

Even after local dev the changes should be getting picked up and tested by a testing cluster.

I think leaving it up to devs to come up with their own local testing k8s is asking for bugs.

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#12
post #5
post #2

Ok, wow. Talk about mixed feelings towards the article... the author is clearly knowledgeable, but it is so unclear why in the world does he opt for this kind of torture. 1. Why kubernetes for development? For most cases you don't need the whole orchestration over multiple nodes overhead, docker-compose is just fine. Incidentally, your push/pull problem is solved as you pull the dependencies and BUILD your app locall…

> 1. Why kubernetes for development? For most cases you don't need the whole orchestration over multiple nodes overhead, docker-compose is just fine. Incidentally, your push/pull problem is solved as you pull the dependencies and BUILD your app locally. Then it's not hermetic and repeatable. We strive for reproducibility between envs, because it reduces the chance that we're relying on incorrect assumptions about env…

I think your team is missing a real testing pipeline that validates your changes against a production-like config on a test-kube..

Like someone higher said:

Develop using a docker-compose, when you think you are done -> run a test pipeline with your versions. That pipeline should be able to validate whether you did not break anything.

Dev_Ops means you do both but doesnt exactly mean you have to do both at the same time..

Most of the issues author described were rether self-imposed.

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#13
post #4

> Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck ? IMHO because we are in a phase of transition. Having worked for years in software industry , I'm convinced we are halfway to a much bigger transformation for Software Engineers / SRE , Developers etc... I work in a Neobank ( N26 , Revolut, etc...) , we are currently in the process of re-writing our entire Core Banking System with MicroServices on top of Kubernetes with Kafka…

> Their workflows is insanely complex and requires hours if not a day to deploy a single change... obviously let's not even talk about the amount of work our SRE has in the pipe to "package" the entire stack of 150+ services in K8 through a single YAML file....

One should always keep in mind the famous aphorism:

> "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection, except for the problem of too many levels of indirection".

You may have just hit the "except" part.

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#15
post #10

> For example, a common set up is to only allow your developers to access to create/edit objects in one namespace. Not best-practice. Best practice is to lock down access to production to grant read-only permissions to developers and force deployments to occur through a controlled pipeline. This controlled pipeline can ensure that changes first go through a staging environment that is essentially identical to product…

My take on it was that the author was talking rather about the DevOps and not only development. And ofcourse he did a pretty poor job at making his DevOps work easy at the company.

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#16
Local development on Kubernetes is in a pretty decent state imo. Minikube + Skaffold. Helm to manage/configure charts. And override resources to lower mem/cpu consumption when running locally. Works just fine for most situations. It's reproducible/consistent across developer environments and is as close as you can get to mapping 1-to-1 with prod.

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#17
The only time I develop on Kubernetes is when I develop something which builds on top of the Kubernetes API. In that case I use skaffold. For all the rest Docker Compose is a better fit.

You don't develop your full CI pipeline on your machine either. So why care about the orchestration?

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#18
What would you recommend for development of some private project on a local server? No cloud cluster, bare metal and great opportunity to learn.

Something on the order of 20-40 services for even the most trivial things. Development speed above all else

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#19
post #11

I think the author is doing it wrong personally. Just spin up a real dev cluster and use that? Why putz around with setups on your laptop? That’s never going to scale team-wise? And if you damn well insist on running your own local k8s cluster for development then the whole thing should be automated infrastructure as code anyways that you start with a command so that other developers will get the same behavior. Even…

Ability to run locally a production like setup (at smaller scale of course) is a big plus imho. 1st, you know how it works, 2nd smaller iterations/feedaback cycles (restart locally vs. push and wait for tests to run).

Re: Why Does Developing on Kubernetes Suck?

#20
post #18

What would you recommend for development of some private project on a local server? No cloud cluster, bare metal and great opportunity to learn. Something on the order of 20-40 services for even the most trivial things. Development speed above all else

Minikube works great for me. You can configure your Docker to use it too, e.g. so ‘docker run’ runs a container.
Post reply on HN