Opening line from their announcement blog post: >It is safe to say that our industry has decided that containers are now the chosen way to package and scale applications. Curious how the HN community feels about that statement. Not so much about the truth of the statement but about the fact that containers are becoming the de facto method of packaging applications.
As far as complexity goes, I would much rather have a nodes where a single application is running and using 100% of resources (instead of having containerd or k8s services running) and do simple autoscaling, having access to host-level metrics that I can map back to applications easier than use Docker, k8s & co. Maybe is it only me, but I care about efficiency. Why waste energy?
The counter-argument is that developer time is more valuable than setting up clusters or autoscaling groups. Well, this breaks down when you have SRE team(s) maintaining the k8s clusters (literally every company I worked for). If you already have SRE people either embedded into your dev teams or separately then you can just build out a CI/CD pipeline that produces that production setup based on blueprints. We usually use Terraform and Ansible with tempalte variables (stage = test|qa|prod, cluster size = x, version = y) that makes it easy for everybody to provision clusters on their own. Does this mean more work than k8s deployments? Yes. Does this mean we have less complexity we need to care about? Yes. In my experience containerization is a development tool to make it extremely easy to achieve fast development cycles but right now the accidental complexity to take that with you to production is not worth it. There are very nice projects like LXC/LXD that I would consider using for security separation and resource management but we usually have clusters where 100% of resources go to a single services. Example: Hadoop cluster, Elasticsearch cluster, Web application (mostly API) clusters. I need to care about the underlying hardware because of financial reasons (what is the cheapest node type I can use to run workload X). k8s would not help here.
To sum it up: I do not think that the industry has decided on this. I also think that we are in the era of wasteful computing which will be finished soon because of reliability and unnecessary CO2 production reasons. Running containers has to be much less fragile and efficient to be considered the way to scale applications. I personally think that Firecracker is a step in the right direction in this while Docker & k8s in the wrong direction.