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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?

#31

Post by chazu »

jkukul wrote: post #11
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #4

> "If this old way of doing things is so error-prone, and it's easier to use declarative solutions like Kubernetes, why does the solution seem to need sooo much work that the role of DevOps seems to dominate IT related job boards? Shouldn't Kubernetes reduce the workload and need less men power?" Because we're living in the stone age of DevOps. Feedback cycles take ages, languages are not typed and error prone, pipel…

I agree with this 100%. We're in the infancy of DevOps. Ironically, "DevOps" started as a philosophy that developers should be able to do operations, e.g. deploy, monitor their apps without relying on external people (previously called Sys Admins, etc). Yet, we're at a stage where the "DevOps" role has become the most prevalent one. IMO things have temporarily gotten slightly worse to get much better later. From the…

> From the productivity standpoint, it is not acceptable that a Machine Learning engineer or a Full Stack Developer are expected to know Kubernetes. Or that they need to interact with a Kubernetes person/team.

I agree - these things should be abstracted from the developer - thats the goal of SRE/platform engineering - DevOps is [supposed to be] as you said, a philosophical and cultural stance around early productionization. While not mutually exclusive, they're not the same thing.

But back to your point re: orchestration-level concerns being foisted upon devs - at a shop of any size, there will be devs who feel they _need_ to touch kubernetes to get their job done (wrongly, IMHO) as well as devs who want nothing to do with it - so without engineering leadership throwing their support heavily behind a specific approach, its hard for a small team to deliver value.

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

#32

Post by dtech »

Because they're also doing more things. 20 years ago you might have a single server in the broom closet handled by the sysadmin and developers running tests locally (if you were lucky), nowadays we want all those things you mentioned for production, and CI/CD for developing.

I'd wager providing all those things 20 years ago without k8s and CI tools would've required relatively more sysadmins

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

#33

Post by jmillikin »

binarymax wrote: post #29

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 s…

Kubernetes can't (currently) scale to Google sizes. It's designed for small- or medium-sized businesses, which might have 50,000 VMs or fewer.

There are entire SaaS industries that could fit into a single Google/Facebook/Amazon datacenter.

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

#34

Post by caymanjim »

Thaxll wrote: post #26
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...

And a service configuration, ingress, other networking, persistent volumes, a mechanism for updating deployed applications, management of the nodes (even with a managed service like EKS or other cloud solutions), logging, roles, security, etc. If you're a developer and all you have to worry about is one deployment spec, thank your devops team for making your life easier. Kubernetes is great for making the dev team's life easier, but someone did a lot of work to make it that easy for you.

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

#35

Post by ceejayoz »

Thaxll wrote: post #26
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...

"Before you begin, make sure your Kubernetes cluster is up and running."

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

#37

Post by blorenz »

Thaxll wrote: post #26
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...

I'm expecting you are getting downvoted because of your assumptive and dismissive statement. The type of deployment you are suggesting is overkill to apply k8s as there is minimal to no orchestration.

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

#38

Post by dusanh »

binarymax wrote: post #29

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 s…

Asking as someone who has only tipped his toes into devops lately and is looking to learn K8, what is considered a reasonable "lightweight" alternative to Kubernetes these days?

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

#39

Post by malwrar »

Thaxll wrote: post #26
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...

Still need to maintain the cluster though, and boy does it require some fun maintenance. Kubernetes is more than just a distributed docker image scheduler, you also need to install and maintain basic dependencies like the pod networking implementation (a whole virtual IP space!!), DNS, loadbalancing, persistent volumes, monitoring, etc etc. Maybe your cloud provider sets it all up for you, but you're not going to escape having to debug and fix issues with that stuff, whether they be show stopping bugs or performance-impacting inconveniences like higher latency.

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

#40

Post by mrweasel »

flyinprogrammer wrote: post #23

Because it primarily wasn't built for developers. It was built to keep sys admins relevant and give vendors a common place to sell their vaporware.

While I don't know who Kubernetes was built for, it's certainly developers who are pushing for Kubernetes.

The majority of SREs and sys admins I know don't really want to run Kubernetes. They'll do it, if that's what's called for, but it just adds complexity to trivial problems.

Developers want Kubernetes because it's quick to deploy containers, networks, load balancers, anything they want. That's fair, traditional hosting doesn't have much that provides that level of flexibility or that will allow you to get off the ground at that speed.

The issue is that as a platform Kubernetes isn't that easy to manage. It certain has improve, but it can be difficult to debug when it break. Nobody wants a 3AM page that a Kubernetes cluster is down. We've even seen companies say that they'll just stand up a new cluster if something breaks, because it's faster. Add to that the complexity of components deployed inside your cluster. As an SRE it absolutely suck to get the "hey the network's broken" from a developer, because that means that you now have to be an expert on WHATEVER load balancer or CNI they've decides to pull in.

As great as much of the stuff you can deploy in Kubernetes is, it's still harder to debug than an application running on a VM or bare metal server, with a "real" network.

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