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Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

cloudcritical.org

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Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#81

Post by dijit »

nostrebored wrote: post #64
dijit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there’s no slider. Typically you slide the instance size for other reasons. Here’s the thing: either you care about it (and you can game the sizing of the instance) or you dont and you run kubernetes. But you if you don’t care then it doesn’t matter. There’s no slider for you to care about. It is not extra overhead.

why is this slider important? You’ve picked something very arbitrary here

Uh. Because the parent said that kubernetes and VMs are different because "with VMs you have to configure things [..] like networking performance".

But you configure the exact same things as with VMs and kubernetes.

Network performance (as per OP) is not configurable on either.

You just accept whatever accidental default you happen to have, it's not a conscious decision people are making, and it's an awkward assumption to say that you have to think about it.

Because if you have to think about it: that doesn't go away with kubernetes anyway: if anything it probably gets worse.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#82

Post by jasonrichardsmi »

crmd wrote: post #59

I find ‘heterodox blogger’ to be one of the more annoying business personas. When I had to work at IBM in the early 2000s because of an acquisition, we met a lot of ‘corporate edgelords’ whose personal brand was built on eloquently explaining to IBM audiences how every cloud computing innovation coming out of West Coast tech companies already existed on the mainframe since the 1970s, and was therefore stupid to inves…

Sorry, I am not sure when heterodox is a good thing or bad thing. Maybe you could qualify that for me.

Well Gmail is kinda stupid. I mean they are reading your emails.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#83

Post by Eritico »

dijonman2 wrote: post #73
Eritico wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not the same. You can easily run node pools automatically because your abstraction layer is k8s with containerd or docker. You also know that you can throw away VMs because they don't contain any state. You are not losing data just because you kill a VM or a VM breaks. It is way easier to just spin up n nodes and provision them all equally than whatever you did before. In my team, we can manage way way way more n…

I think there is a healthy dose of anti-vm bias in your viewpoints. Lauding Kubernetes because ops work took too much of your time is just shifting your burden elsewhere, even if that means paying a bit more for an offering like ECS fargate. Any environment with configuration management can treat instances as ephemeral. It’s a best practice. I view docker more as a package manager, no more dependency hell. In any eve…

I only answered the question why it is different with kubernetes.

I dont have anything against VMs. Feel free to click yourself a VM on any cloud provider, use it however you like.

K8s abstracts VMs away and i have and had real issues with maintaining VMs. Docker filling up the node with logs. Unable to upgrade the BaseOS due to python dependencies. Managing the same VM stack through ansible and everything ansible or chef brings to the table.

There have been plenty of self healing mechanism in place which do solve unfortunate issues. Memory? The service restarted, was offline for 3 minutes and is now working again. Node disk full? Pods get scheduled away, new node comes up, done. Update/upgrade of nodes? Nodepool does it for me.

For me, k8s has 2 real issues like memory (swap support is wip finally!) and stateful workloads like a database. But the concept of an operator shows a bright future.

k8s also does one thing very nice: It enforces certain aspects which are a pain in the ass later. That VM which wasn't updated for years and run just fine? Now there is an issue and it needs to be fixed asap. But now the debian repositories are no longer available. I have to fix apt srce list first, then i need to fix dependencies and then i need to restart it.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#84

Post by chousuke »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #76
jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi danpalmer, I kind of hit on this in the article. How do you think abstracting away the server adds any value in "public cloud"? Where you can get bespoke VMs, with no concern for the underlying hardware? Can you elaborate?

With Kubernetes you don't have to configure log exfiltration, process management, SSH, host metrics, etc. You don't have to touch Ansible--there's no host management at all. The stuff that you still have to configure (e.g., firewalls, NFS) is all configured through a consistent, declarative interface (Kubernetes manifests) rather than a dozen bespoke, byzantine formats or imperative commands.

Kubernetes is not quite that easy though. Out of the box, you get basically no isolation between anything, and you still have to deal with security contexts and have processes in place for keeping your container images secure. If you use community Helm charts your services may end up running with essentially random privileges that may easily conflict.

The declarative interface is going on the right direction (as far as yaml can be) but configuration management for it is still unsolved. Backups are also often forgotten; they're very easy with virtual machines.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#85

Post by jasonrichardsmi »

Eritico wrote: post #77
jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry you feel that way. The point of the article was not really attempting to address the feature sets of Kubernetes (which I also have issues with), it was really about the sales pitch being delivered by Google. I have A LOT of issues with the things you posted above, and I hope to address them in future articles. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for reading.

I still don't get your motivation on writing your criticism. What is your endgoal? Getting people not to like k8s? Because you don't like to work with it? To push people away from k8s? How do you add value to the current infrastructure/platform ecosystem by 'hating' on it without providing something different? Of course companies present this k8s story as a successful thing. Why would that documentary be negative? An…

I think the emperor is wearing no clothes. I want to move that discussion forward. I feel it is inevitable.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#86

Post by vinceguidry »

mohanmcgeek wrote: post #51
goodpoint wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the heavy lifting to implement containers was done by the kernel developer community and projects like LXC. Yet, docker and kubernetes are very much hype/marketing driven and took away a lot of recognition from the kernel developers.

> kernel developer community This effort was funded in part by Google.

funded != did the work

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#87

Post by rrdharan »

jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #82
crmd wrote: post #59

I find ‘heterodox blogger’ to be one of the more annoying business personas. When I had to work at IBM in the early 2000s because of an acquisition, we met a lot of ‘corporate edgelords’ whose personal brand was built on eloquently explaining to IBM audiences how every cloud computing innovation coming out of West Coast tech companies already existed on the mainframe since the 1970s, and was therefore stupid to inves…

Sorry, I am not sure when heterodox is a good thing or bad thing. Maybe you could qualify that for me. Well Gmail is kinda stupid. I mean they are reading your emails.

They really aren’t.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#88

Post by [deleted] »

jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #82
crmd wrote: post #59

I find ‘heterodox blogger’ to be one of the more annoying business personas. When I had to work at IBM in the early 2000s because of an acquisition, we met a lot of ‘corporate edgelords’ whose personal brand was built on eloquently explaining to IBM audiences how every cloud computing innovation coming out of West Coast tech companies already existed on the mainframe since the 1970s, and was therefore stupid to inves…

Sorry, I am not sure when heterodox is a good thing or bad thing. Maybe you could qualify that for me. Well Gmail is kinda stupid. I mean they are reading your emails.

[deleted]

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#89

Post by koffiezet »

jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #18
danpalmer wrote: post #15

I'm not sure this was authored in full good faith. Things like dismissing Kubernetes attempts to "abstract away the servers" as being pointless because we already had virtualisation is at best ignorance of the differences, and at worst, gaslighting. It's clear that the author doesn't like Kubernetes, and to be honest this documentary is unlikely to change their mind because they are not the target audience. All the "…

Hi danpalmer, I kind of hit on this in the article. How do you think abstracting away the server adds any value in "public cloud"? Where you can get bespoke VMs, with no concern for the underlying hardware? Can you elaborate?

It's not just "abstracting the server". Kubernetes abstracts more than just "a server", it works on a level higher. It does this for storage, networking, compute, services, workloads, scaling, ... and all this is done through a standardised API. This APIforces you to standardise application deployments, making centrally managed logging, monitoring, tracing, ... a breeze. Once you have it working for one application, it'll work for all of them.

And do you need to run this on Amazon, Gcloud, Azure,one of the smaller cloud providers like DigitalOcean or locally on Kind/k3s? It'll require very little work to get them working on any of these - if any. Cloud specific services and persistent storage will be the main issues, but that's something you can't really get around.

Now is it perfect? Absolutely not, as with any tech, there will always be problems and bottlenecks. But it allows development to scale, not just the workloads, and the skills required are transferable, which makes it a much easier sell.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#90

Post by horsawlarway »

Eritico wrote: post #70
jobegrabber wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the title of the website is "Cloud Critical - Your service mesh is garbage". And the author says >No critical conversations about Kubernetes are taking place, aside from outspoken critics on HackerNews or Slashdot, but those are few and far between. The author's agenda is about highlighting that "Kubernetes is not a good solution for most if not all cloud deployments". I'd say there's quite a decent chance th…

I actually believe that the k8s api could be the best abstraction for services we ever had. While i'm running k3s at home (which is very nice to be honest) and big instances at work, i would prefer to have more managed k8s offerings but many already exist. They exist from DigitalOcean, Google, Azure, AWS and its probably way easier for smaller service providers to make a managed solution available. You can also use r…

I'm with you.

Even for tiny personal deployments, I find it a very compelling experience (I'm running micro-k8s at home).

With just a little bit of setup (configuring NAS storage, handing MetalLB an ip range, and installing cert-manager) I get a setup that is robust to any single machine failure (I run a 3 node system on old desktops/laptops), handles a bunch of previously manual tasks (backups, cert updates, auto-restarts) and gives me a wonderful host of tools I now use for personal projects, such as

- CI/CD (DroneCi)

- Private docker registry (Registry:2)

- Dashboard for service availability (kubernetesui/dashboard)

- A TON of personal hosted projects and tools (from bookstack to jellyfin to whatever project I'm working on now)

And for the most part - I just don't have to think about it all that much. Sure, the initial setup took a few hours. But I've torn down and rebuilt the entire thing from scratch in less than an hour from backups, and my README for "starting with nothing but a blank disk in an old machine to fully functional" is about 2 pages long, and the vast majority of it is local router config and DNS entries (still manual).

I'm easily replacing hundreds of dollars a month in SaaS/Cloud charges with it, and it's still just not taking up all that much of my time.

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