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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?

#71

Post by jmillikin »

rahen wrote: post #57

Kubernetes can really help bringing more scalability. All you need is to rewrite your application (think microservices), reduce cold latency (get rid of anything VM based such as Java, or rewrite in Spring or Quarkus), use asynchronous RPC, and decouple compute and storage. Then you need an elastic platform, for instance Kubernetes, with all the glue around such as Istio, and Prometheus, and Fluentd, and Grafana, Jae…

It honestly sounds like you've confused Kubernetes with some other platform.

Running a big Java monolith with 128GiB RAM footprint in Kubernetes works well. It's at its best when deployments are infrequent and traffic patterns are stable (or at least predictable).

If someone wants stateless microservices with immediate scale-up/scale-down, then that's more like a FaaS ("functions as a service") and they'll be better off with OpenFaaS instead of Kubernetes.

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

#72

Post by unity1001 »

Kubernetes just solves the long-standing problems at a certain level of infra.

But like everything else in tech, solution of the problems at a given level enables everyone to do much more and build more complex systems that do more complicated stuff on top of that level. We always push the frontier forward with every new solution.

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

#75

Post by patrickserrano »

caymanjim wrote: post #34
Thaxll wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Couldn't agree with this more. At my last company there was a fair bit of time put into making the deployment process for our microservices as simple as added a new YAML file to the deployment repo. That file pulled a custom chart, and as a dev you just needed to configure a few variables to get everything up an running. But if you were deploying something that couldn't use one of the pre-configured charts it was a bit more work, especially if you've never done it be hand before.

Probably 98% of the devs were blissfully unaware of that complexity that the charts abstracted, and it let them focus on the services they were writing. I wasn't one of them, and always made sure to thank the devops team for simplifying the day to day deployments whenever I had to deal with writing a custom one.

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

#76

Post by nokya »

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…

Exactly.

I am consulting with a startup right now that chose to go everything docker/k8s. The CTO is half-shocked/half-depressed by the complexity of our architecture meetings, although he used to be a banking software architect in his previous assignments. Every question I ask ends up in a long 15 minutes monologue by the guy who architected all of it, even the most simple questions. They are soon launching a mobile app (only a mobile app and its corresponding API, not even a website) and they already have more than 60 containers running and talking to each other across three k8s clusters and half of them interact directly with third-parties outside.

Even as I am being paid by the hour, I really feel sad for both the CTO and the developers attending the meeting.

k8s is definitely not for everyone. Google has thousands hardware systems running the same hypervisor, same OS, same container engine and highly specialized stacks of micro-services that need to run by the thousands. And even, I am not sure that k8s would satisfy Google's actual needs tbh.

Ironically, there are some companies that highly benefit from this and they are not necessarily "large" companies. In my case, k8s and devops in general made my life infinitely easier for on-site trainings: those who come with a poorly configured or decade-old laptop can actually enjoy the labs at the same pace than every other attendee.

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

#77

Post by jeffwask »

First. DevOps is a culture not a job most places have so many DevOps roles because they are doing it wrong.

In the olden days of 10 years ago, most operations teams worked around the clock to service the application. Like every day there would be someone on my team doing something after hours usually multiple. Tools like Kubernettes, Cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) have added significant complexity but moved operations to more of a 9 to 5 gig. Less and less do I see after hours deployments, weekend migrations, etc. Even alert fatigue goes way down because things are self healing. This is on top of being able to move faster and safer, scale instantly, and everything else.

Operations side used to be a lot of generalists admin types and DBA's. With today's environment, you need a lot more experts. AWS alone has 1 trillion services and 2.4 billion of those are just different ways to deploy containers. So you see a lot more back end roles because it's no longer automate spinning up a couple servers, install some software, deploy, monitor and update. It's a myriad of complex services working together in an ephemeral environment that no one person understands anymore.

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

#78

Post by jmillikin »

mrweasel wrote: post #40
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 h…

  > Developers want Kubernetes because it's quick to deploy containers,
  > networks, load balancers, anything they want.
  > [...]
  >
  > 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.
This is why the "DevOps" approach exists.

If a developer wants root in the cluster so they can deploy some strange low-level plugin, then they need to be the ones carrying the pager.

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

#79

Post by durnygbur »

Kubernetes and Angular are how Google burns resources to prevent any significant competition or innovation being created outside of their sphere of influence. Engineers who wank at sophistication usually receive the most attention and decisive power, btw that's what keeps me from participating in interviews. Another reason is that IT engineers are such a low plankton that someone up in the hierarchy with massive indirect financial bonus for using this technology decides to hire "Angular Developers", "Kubernetes DevOps consultants" and this triggers the hiring down to HR and recruiters who simply filter by keywords.

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

#80

Post by stonemetal12 »

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…

It does save work, consider what you would have to do to provide those benefits without a tool. You would have to monitor usage and spin up new instances manually for scalability. You would have to manually update instances when updates came out. You would have to manually handle failover and stand by instances for availability. Manually configure load balancers. etc.

Kubernetes is a great tool if you have scaling management problems.

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