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

I’ve seen actually decent engineers (maybe they’re not decent?) bring down prod because they accidentally Kubectl deploy’ed from their command line.

When technology makes previous difficult things easy, this technology will be used to do more things that were previously impossible.

I personally haven't seen anyone use k8s to achieve things that were impossible before. They just use it because 1) They think everyone is using it 2) They don't know how to do it any other way

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Take the development of programming as an analogy:

* Punched cards

* Programming in assembler

* Goto

* Callable procedures

* Proper functions

* Compiled languages (There used to be companies just selling a big C compiler)

* Interpreters/JIT compilation/...

* ...

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And here's a similar progression:

* Servers in your basement

* Some server rented where you login via SSH

* Docker/Kubernetes/Clusters in the cloud

* Lambdas and other serverless solutions

* ...

As a sibling comment pointed out: We're still in the stone ages. Somewhere between punch cards and proper functions.

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To rephrase it in reversal: "Infrastructure as code has it backwards"

Right now, we manually partition our code, then provision infrastructure and then push our code to this infrastructure.

Instead, we should take a high level language that compiles to the cloud:

Just write your business logic and the the compiler figures out what clusters/services/event-buses/databases/etc to use; It will automatically partition the code, package, build, provision, push, update. And there's even room for something like JIT: Based on the load parts of your logic get, the compiler could switch databases. Also: Automated data migrations based on your code updates. But I guess we'll end up with a big distributed virtual machine that scales infinitely and completely hides the existence of servers.

There's already some glimpses of this future: No-code, the magic pulumi does with lambdas, several language projects that get rid of the file system and just store the AST in a DB, smart contracts where you pay for single computation steps...

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But back to the question: Kubernetes/AWS/etc is a lot of work because it's not really THE SOLUTION.

Anywhere I’ve worked business always prioritizes high availability and close to zero downtime. No one sees a random delivered feature. But if a node fails at night - everybody knows it. Clients first of all.

We’ve achieved it all almost out of the box with EKS. Setup with Fargate nodes was literally a one-liner of eksctl.

Multiple environments are separated with namespaces. Leader elections between replicas are also easy. Lens is a very simple to use k8s IDE.

If you know what you’re doing with Kubernetes (don’t use EC2 for nodes, they fail randomly), it’s a breeze.