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Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

blog.coinbase.com

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Re: Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

#331

Post by tarsinge »

dvcrn wrote: post #131
dvt wrote: post #11

> We would need to build/staff a full-time Compute team This actually was a very real problem at my current job. The data pipeline was migrated to k8s and I was one of the engineers that worked to do that. Unfortunately, neither myself (nor the other data engineer) was a Kubernetes guy, so we kept running into dev-ops walls while also trying to build features and maintain the current codebase. It was a nightmare. If…

I work on a 2-person project and decided to go with kubernetes (through digitalocean) for the cluster. I am managing everything with terraform and I don't have any big problems. I like that I can write everything as terraform manifests, have it diffed on git push and applied to prod if I want to. Sure it had a learning curve but now I just describe my deployments and k8s does the rest, which then reflects back on dig…

If it runs on a single instance then a simple docker-compose file give you all of that.

Re: Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

#333

Post by wildermuthn »

This article was written to address what seems like an internal debate or discussion about why they don’t use Kubernetes at Coinbase. As such, it boils down to: we already use something else, and moving to K8s comes with risks and challenges that outweigh the benefits, particularly security concerns. As a crypto firm, Coinbase rightfully seems zealous about security.

The article doesn’t claim that K8s is a bad solution. It only claims that migrating to K8s doesn’t work for them at this point in time.

If you are starting something new, or rebuilding a system entirely, and if you are on GCP, and you anticipate the need for scale, then K8s/GKE is a sane choice. What would be insane is trying to roll your own solution. There’s no avoiding the complexity of managing infrastructure, but at least with K8s you won’t be alone, and you won’t make the mistakes others have already made and fixed. Some people never seem to get K8s, in the same way some people never get functional programming. You might be one of them, so that’s something to take into account.

A lot of people have had bad experiences with K8s, but just as many have had bad experiences with Docker, or with Linux, or with computers in general. This doesn’t mean the technology is bad. It just means that not every good technology will work for you or your use-case. Kubernetes is a solid choice, especially GKE. But think carefully before deciding to use it. It is one of those tech decisions that will dominate the rest of your choices for years. In my case, it was a decision I‘ve never regretted.

Re: Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

#336

Post by dtech »

Aeolun wrote: post #179
threeseed wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see how k8s avoids the need to learn about cloud vendor specific tech e.g searching "aws RDS k8s" Not sure what you mean here. Kubernetes is designed to be cloud and vendor agnostic. And RDS is a hosted database that you connect to from your application. Whether that applications runs standalone, in a container or VM is irrelevant.

> Kubernetes is designed to be cloud and vendor agnostic. But it’s not. Connecting to EKS is completely different from connecting to GCP. Setting up worker nodes is completely different too, oh and load balancers. It’s only the last mile that’s similar.

We've migrated from Heroku to EKS using Terraform to set it up. We done a small PoC for Azure, and within a day we had a small cluster and one of our apps running. The app terraform code required only 1 variable change.

Sure, it's far from drop & replace, but "completely different" is a huge misrepresentation in my experience. Running multi-cloud seemed quite doable.

Re: Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

#338

Post by zerubeus »

merb wrote: post #239
rawoke083600 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you can run everything on a $10 vm...do you really need k8 ?

most people probably want the following: - no downtime deployments - distributed jobs - as managed infra as possible without k8s some things would be hard.

I use dokku since the distributed job is not a feature i’m looking for

Re: Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

#339

Post by OOPMan »

flowerlad wrote: post #42
dvt wrote: post #11

> We would need to build/staff a full-time Compute team This actually was a very real problem at my current job. The data pipeline was migrated to k8s and I was one of the engineers that worked to do that. Unfortunately, neither myself (nor the other data engineer) was a Kubernetes guy, so we kept running into dev-ops walls while also trying to build features and maintain the current codebase. It was a nightmare. If…

> If you want k8s, you really do need people that know how to maintain it on a more or less full time schedule. What is the alternative to k8s that does not need people to have any technical knowledge? To me Kubernetes is extremely attractive because it helps me avoid learning cloud vendors' proprietary technologies. K8s is learn once, use everywhere, which is fantastic. I am a 1-person venture doing everything from…

Couldn't have done it without k8s?

Ahahahahaha, kids say the darndest things these days...

Re: Container technologies at Coinbase: Why Kubernetes is not part of our stack

#340

Post by zerubeus »

arcticfox wrote: post #141
dvcrn wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on a 2-person project and decided to go with kubernetes (through digitalocean) for the cluster. I am managing everything with terraform and I don't have any big problems. I like that I can write everything as terraform manifests, have it diffed on git push and applied to prod if I want to. Sure it had a learning curve but now I just describe my deployments and k8s does the rest, which then reflects back on dig…

I'm also on a 2-person project on DigitalOcean k8s, also very happy. K8s is kind of messy compared to Heroku, which I don't love, but is also way more powerful and can be more secure. I don't know what I'd use instead of it, exactly as you said. Also, we run a VPC-only K3s node for some simple internal tools that works great as well.

for 2 person project dokku is the smartest choice
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