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Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#21

Post by 28304283409234 »

mfer wrote: post #9

A few thoughts... 1) Kubernetes is an infra platform for the ops in DevOps. If developers need to spend a lot of time doing Kubernetes it takes away from their ability/time to do their dev. So, there are a lot of platform teams who pull together tools to simplify the experience for devs or DevOps specialists who handle operating the workloads. 2) Kuberentes is, as Kelsey Hightower puts it, a platform to build platfor…

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Kubernetes is hard, huge, complex because it solves hard, huge, complex problems. Or tries to anyway.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#22

Post by chazu »

> one could argue that the role of sys admins just got more specialized

Read the introduction to the SRE book, available free online [1] - and you'll see that SRE is defined _in contrast to_ systems administration. Its specifically defined as software engineering with the goal of managing operational complexity.

Modern shops' failure to understand this (most SREs haven't read any of the book, let alone stopped to think what SRE actually means) is IMHO a primary factor in the failure of most "devops transformations"

[1] https://sre.google/sre-book/part-I-introduction/

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#26

Post by Thaxll »

caymanjim wrote: post #14

The premise of your question is invalid. Have you ever tried setting up a Kubernetes cluster and deploying apps in it? Kubernetes doesn't save work, it adds work. In return, you get a lot of benefits, but it wasn't designed to reduce human work, nor was it designed to eliminate devops jobs. It was designed for scalability and availability more than anything. Most people using Kubernetes should be using something simp…

> Have you ever tried setting up a Kubernetes cluster and deploying apps in it? Kubernetes doesn't save work

This is wrong, deploying on Kubernetes is easy and quick for most apps, you have one docker image one deployment spec and that's it.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/de...

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#27

Post by normie3000 »

shawnz wrote: post #12
jmillikin wrote: post #6

> 1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD > 2) external users: end users > > Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do > 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just > got more specialized). Both are called sysadmins. SRE is a specialized software engineering role -- you'd hire SREs if you wanted to create something like Kubernetes in-house, or do extensive customiza…

essentially Jevons paradox

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#28

Post by jmillikin »

mfer wrote: post #9

A few thoughts... 1) Kubernetes is an infra platform for the ops in DevOps. If developers need to spend a lot of time doing Kubernetes it takes away from their ability/time to do their dev. So, there are a lot of platform teams who pull together tools to simplify the experience for devs or DevOps specialists who handle operating the workloads. 2) Kuberentes is, as Kelsey Hightower puts it, a platform to build platfor…

  > 3) Kubernetes is hard. The API is huge and it's complex.
  > The docs are limited.
Eh, I wouldn't go that far. Kubernetes has a lot of API surface for features that are useless (config maps), attractive nuisances (CRDs, packet routing), or outright dangerous (secrets). If you strip it down to its core mission of distributed process scheduling, the API is reasonable and the docs are extensive.

The biggest challenge with learning Kubernetes is that third-party documentation is largely funded by ecosystem startups flogging their weird product. It can be very difficult to figure out things like network overlays when there's so few examples that don't involve third-party tools.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#29

Post by binarymax »

Kubernetes is a Google scale solution. Lots of teams said “hey if Google does it then it must be good!”…but forgot that they didn’t have the scale. It caught on so much that for whatever reason it’s now the horrendous default. I’ve worked on at least 3 consulting projects that incorporated K8s and it slowed everything down and took way too much time, and we got nothing in return - because those projects only needed several instances, and not dozens or hundreds.

If you need less than 8 instances to do host your product, run far away anytime anyone mentions k8s

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#30

Post by zelphirkalt »

The short answer is: Because of Kubernetes.

The longer answer is: When you switch to Kubernetes, you are introducing _a lot_ of complexity, which, depending on your actual project, might not be inherent complexity. Yes, you get a shiny tool, but you also get a lot of more things to think about and to manage, to run that cluster, which in turn will require, that you get more devops on board.

Sure, there might be projects out there, where Kubernetes is the right solution, but before you switch to it, have a real long hard thinking about that and definitely explore simpler alternatives. It is not like Kubernetes is the only game in town. It is also not like Google invents any wheels with Kubernetes.

Not everyone is Google or Facebook or whatever. We need to stop adopting solutions just because they get hyped and used at big company. We need to look more at our real needs and avoid introducing unnecessary complexity.

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