The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#2Great article. Thanks
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#3I think they could get around the problem of requiring a third-party cluster manager if they really thought through the chicken-and-egg problems, and concentrated the circular dependencies into a very small core.
I’ve had the experience of working through the design of a system over and over until circular dependencies can be tamed through a bootstrap procedure.
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#4Why do I need four people for on call with a self hosted cluster but only one for a managed cluster? My application still needs the on call support.
I think this cost estimate does not add up.
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#5What about persistent storage and access costs ?
And couldn't that then over time increase managed k8s costs significantly ?
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#6Why do I need four people for on call with a self hosted cluster but only one for a managed cluster? My application still needs the on call support. I think this cost estimate does not add up.
You're right, having only one person on call for a managed cluster doesn't make a lot of sense. We should probably have planned with at least 2 people for a managed cluster too to cover 24/7/365 operations.
I think our thought process here is that developers are also involved in on call support for the service availability and the k8s cluster availability is mostly managed by the provider, but the cluster can still fail even if the control plane is managed.
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#7What about persistent storage and access costs ? And couldn't that then over time increase managed k8s costs significantly ?
We focused on estimating the minimum/entry-level cost of Kubernetes here.
If you have a data intensive service, it surely would add up, but it's not specific to Kubernetes. If you go with VMs or a Serverless deployment, you'll have to pay it too.
If you're speaking about the storage and data transfers related to the Kubernetes control plane itself, I don't believe it represents a significant cost, even with a large cluster.
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#8> For all these offerings [GKE, EKS, AKS], there are no automatic version updates or auto-recovery and you still need to pay for the computing resources like CPU, memory, and ephemeral storage that your worker pods consume.
I don’t know about the others, but GKE certainly has automatic updates (for masters and nodes). There’s also auto-repair and a backup feature (is this “auto-recovery”?). GKE has also had autopilot for nearly a year, which bills based on Pod requests.
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#9Why do I need four people for on call with a self hosted cluster but only one for a managed cluster? My application still needs the on call support. I think this cost estimate does not add up.
You're right, having only one person on call for a managed cluster doesn't make a lot of sense. We should probably have planned with at least 2 people for a managed cluster too to cover 24/7/365 operations. I think our thought process here is that developers are also involved in on call support for the service availability and the k8s cluster availability is mostly managed by the provider, but the cluster can still f…
Self managed cluster needs networking, some kind of persistent volume storage and the nodes themselves need to be somewhat maintained.
I think you could get one person to be on-call for all those things, personally. But then I think that person should not be on-call for application support (IE; not the things running inside k8s, they would be the person the on-call application developer/administrator would call if they couldn’t debug issues with networking, for instance).
Re: The True Cost of Kubernetes: People, Time and Productivity
#10These costs are highly inflated. Not sure why you need 4 people to operate a small 6 node cluster. From my own personal experience, one guy can do that part time. Your cluster has redundancy, so most problems can wait to be dealt with during regular hours.