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Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

kubernetes.academy

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Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#41

Post by blackoil »

shyneeup wrote: post #8

the hype around k8s is unreal..... But should everyone even learn k8s? A lot of the core features of k8s and container orchestration is getting abstracted away at a rapid pace with more things being built on top of k8s. I see this at my current company where we have a ton of ops people who have only ever used vmware....with cloud migration and container focused workflows being the standard now they are fearing like t…

~everyone should learn it, though not everyone should use it. k8s allows new deployment patterns and app structures. A senior dev. should know enough about it, that when a right opportunity comes they should be able to identify it.

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#43

Post by nfg »

discordianfish wrote: post #11
shyneeup wrote: post #8

the hype around k8s is unreal..... But should everyone even learn k8s? A lot of the core features of k8s and container orchestration is getting abstracted away at a rapid pace with more things being built on top of k8s. I see this at my current company where we have a ton of ops people who have only ever used vmware....with cloud migration and container focused workflows being the standard now they are fearing like t…

> lot of the core features of k8s and container orchestration is getting abstracted away I see this too and it worries me. You should rarely have to do this. CRDs tend to get overused. I'd encourage everyone to think twice before adding a custom controller. Vanilla k8s (with cloud-provider integration) is powerful, useful, and complex as it is.

Let me ask you a question if I may: I have a server app I’m running on k8s, it’s stateful and external users connect to it (over grpc). Users connect to a specific server which is identified by ID, this is important and can’t be easily rearchitected. I also expose an API to spin up servers for new ids which users can then connect to. At present I’m doing this by having my “controller” api (which is just an app running in a pod which exposes a rest api then makes calls to the k8s api) create a new deployment+service per server and then add an ingress for that service. I’ve been considering taking the k8s functionality from my controller and putting it in a new CRD + controller. Is there a better way to do this? I feel like I’m fighting the system somewhat with my current approach and yet I don’t see a simple answer using vanilla k8s primitives. I feel like what I want is scalable statefulsets that automatically create an service+ingress to each pod created but nothing seems to offer that. My use-case seems simple and common, so how is everyone else solving this problem.

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#44

Post by eropple »

streetcat1 wrote: post #36
eropple wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The underlying hardware" has side effects. You can't exactly ignore them. And your cloud provider has non-substitutable stuff. Just as an example from my day today, by hewing to k8s you lose stuff like Athena and Glue for data analytics and ETL. I'm sure somebody out there would like to charge me 10x what AWS does to do a worse job of it inside of k8s, but no. So instead you get a Frankenstein of Terraform/Pulumi/Cl…

Thanks for the feedback. I do not think that k8s is bad bet long term as you paint it to be. Of course it is less mature than AWS. But the point is 5 years from now. The problem with AWS is the price and the latency. Everything is fine until you get the bill. But by than you are completely locked to that architecture. The same apply to all the public cloud providers, not just AWS. So as I see it, for new applications…

I gotta ask, because now you're firmly in my backyard--what's the biggest cloud spend you've ever been in charge of? I ask because "Cloud costs" keeps coming up as this bugbear reason to use k8s and it isn't a real concern for the 99th percentile of applications. An application that's expensive when running directly against a cloud provider's APIs will remain expensive when running in k8s, if not moreso because of k8s's steadfast refusal to pay attention to the bin packing problem. The galaxy-brain thought on HN is that cloud providers are so much more expensive than OVH or Hetzner or whatever--it's literally meaningless. People cost a lot. Even an inefficient use of AWS doesn't cost very much. By the time you're at the point where your cloud spend exceeds one FTE, you should probably have forty and the wins it gives you should be self-evident or you've screwed up somewhere else (and that "somewhere else" is probably your business plan).

I've moved nontrivial systems from AWS to GCP and in the reverse direction. It's a job done in Terraform/Pulumi and while a competently written application or set of services needs some work to do the move it's work you are likely to do once at most. (Emphasis on at most. The overwhelming, overwhelming majority of companies are way better off going multi-region in a single cloud provider than going multi-provider. Multi-cloud is for the rich and the silly.) The underlying cloud provider doesn't matter very much when you can pay somebody like me to come in for a month or two and help you make your application an actual citizen of the platform you want to use and leverage its efficiencies properly. The "good long term bet" is abstract interfaces in your code--the hype-driven cycle of the new-and-shiny means there's a nontrivial risk that k8s is no longer sexy enough to blog about by the time that "oh, we now need to move to a new provider!" even matters to you.

(I am contractually obligated not to step in the microservices pothole. It's a good way to waste development time and not ship, though.)

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#45

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

pfd1986 wrote: post #30

Is it bad that the best part of the tutorial for me was to discover fzf? https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/fzf-a-command-line-fuzzy-f...

That doesn't mean very much; fzf is great enough that it could be the best part of a tutorial even if the trial was already good :-)

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#46

Post by zinclozenge »

streetcat1 wrote: post #21
deforciant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

totally agree :) I have been running Kubernetes in production for several years now on multiple projects. So far I had no need to use any CRDs or even Helm. Just well maintained deployments, services, secrets and ingress manifests.

So how do you run stateful workloads? E.g. postgres or mysql?

Generally speaking, you probably shouldn't run databases in k8s unless you need to scale them dynamically, or cloud disk performance is acceptable to you. Having said that, k8s is getting a lot of support for running databases on local disks. A lot of newsql databases (CockroachDB, TiDB, Yugabyte, Vitess, etc) are shipping with strong k8s support/integration.

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#47

Post by RexM »

deforciant wrote: post #13
discordianfish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lot of the core features of k8s and container orchestration is getting abstracted away I see this too and it worries me. You should rarely have to do this. CRDs tend to get overused. I'd encourage everyone to think twice before adding a custom controller. Vanilla k8s (with cloud-provider integration) is powerful, useful, and complex as it is.

totally agree :) I have been running Kubernetes in production for several years now on multiple projects. So far I had no need to use any CRDs or even Helm. Just well maintained deployments, services, secrets and ingress manifests.

I've started trying to learn more about kubernetes by setting up some personal services and it seems like everything I find online points to some helm chart to install.

I think because I don't fully understand k8s, yet, helm seems too magical. It's abstracting away what I already don't understand and doesn't feel right.

For now, I've been focusing on writing my manifests and applying them with kubectl to get a feel for what's going on under the hood. Maybe a time will come where it's a tool that I'll need to reach for, though.

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#48

Post by ar_lan »

shyneeup wrote: post #8

the hype around k8s is unreal..... But should everyone even learn k8s? A lot of the core features of k8s and container orchestration is getting abstracted away at a rapid pace with more things being built on top of k8s. I see this at my current company where we have a ton of ops people who have only ever used vmware....with cloud migration and container focused workflows being the standard now they are fearing like t…

VMware announced Project Pacific two days ago at VMworld which targets this usecase you are mentioning - https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/08/introducing-project...

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#49

Post by gatherhunterer »

My only complaints are that the audio is not normalized across the videos and the viewing experience is negatively affected by sudden highs and lows in the volume. The cookie banner is also tickling my OCD as it pops up every time I change pages.

I would prefer that this content be made available in a written format as videos are not great for communicating this non-visual information (however most people are more comfortable watching than they are reading). A of the content of these videos with the diagrams included would be perfect.

Re: Kubernetes Academy, a free product-agnostic education platform

#50

Post by streetcat1 »

eropple wrote: post #44
streetcat1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback. I do not think that k8s is bad bet long term as you paint it to be. Of course it is less mature than AWS. But the point is 5 years from now. The problem with AWS is the price and the latency. Everything is fine until you get the bill. But by than you are completely locked to that architecture. The same apply to all the public cloud providers, not just AWS. So as I see it, for new applications…

I gotta ask, because now you're firmly in my backyard--what's the biggest cloud spend you've ever been in charge of? I ask because "Cloud costs" keeps coming up as this bugbear reason to use k8s and it isn't a real concern for the 99th percentile of applications. An application that's expensive when running directly against a cloud provider's APIs will remain expensive when running in k8s, if not moreso because of k8…

Thanks again.

So more expensive is on a relative basis and taking into account the egress traffic from the cloud. My workload involve training machine learning models and serving them. Training on the cloud is 20X more expensive, and you cannot use commodity GPU (banned by Nivdia).

Moreover, My platform offer automl, which basically trade data scientist time for compute time. However, since I need to train 100's or 1000's of models, this can become very expensive, very fast.

Since I am not sure what my customers load will be like, I want to give them the option to move between clouds or on prem.

For the long term prospects of kubernetes. For me it is clear the kubernetes have found PMF and it is now at the first 1/4 or 1/3 of the S curve. IBM is all in, VMWARE is all in, Azure is all in, Gcp is all in.

Also, what are the alternatives ? Do you agree that containers are better than jar files or manual deployment options?. Do you agree that having a CI/CD pipelines with fully automatic unit/func tests is better than throwing code over the wall to some QA department?

So if containers are better packaging/deployment architecture, they need to be managed/monitored etc.

For micro services. In my case, the data since part is written in python, while the control plane (kubernetes operators) is written in go. So micro services are actually a very neat solution to a polygot product.

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