Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 433 posts

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

#121

Post by wvh »

There's a shift away from programs that run on actual computers to software that runs on clusters, a large conceptual computer. Whether ultimately Kubernetes-the-software is the answer or not I don't know, but I don't think we're going back to installing packages on individual machines, as the benefits of the conceptual large computer are too great and the most logical way to solve challenges with scale and availability.

A lot of what is called DevOps goes into adapting software to this new mindset. A lot of that software is not written with best practices in mind, and likewise lots of tools are still in their infancy and have rough edges. I think it's fair to say some time and resources go into learning new ways of doing things, and it might not be the best choice for everybody at this stage to spend those resources unless there's an obvious need.

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

#122

Post by throwaway894345 »

Avalaxy wrote: post #101
planetafro wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know my dude, all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice. I agree with some other comments in this thread about a general fervor in the Enterprise space to "modernize" needlessly. This conversation usually lands on the company copying what everyone else is doing or what Gartner tells them to do. Cue "D…

> all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice I don't agree. I spun up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, which was indeed easy. But then I had to figure out how to write the correct deployment scripts to deploy my docker containers to it, and how to configure all the security stuff. After more than a week of tryin…

You're not dumb, you're just new to it, and it's fundamentally hard stuff anyways, and if you can find a higher-level abstraction that lets you get work done faster, then all the better. However, the question is comparing Kubernetes to traditional VM-based infrastructure (especially with pet nodes) whereas you're comparing Kubernetes to a higher-level abstraction.

For what it's worth, deploying in Kubernetes is pretty easy once you figure it out (and often finding the information is the hardest part). All you need to do is update the Deployment resource's "image" parameter. You can do that with `kubectl patch` like so:

    kubectl patch deployment foo -p '{"spec":{"containers":[{"name":"main","image":"new-image"}]}}'
Kubernetes will handle bringing up a new replicaset, validating health checks, draining the old replicaset, etc.

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

#123

Post by throwaway7865 »

planetafro wrote: post #82
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…

I don't know my dude, all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice. I agree with some other comments in this thread about a general fervor in the Enterprise space to "modernize" needlessly. This conversation usually lands on the company copying what everyone else is doing or what Gartner tells them to do. Cue "D…

Literally a one-liner for AWS EKS:

eksctl create cluster --name mycluster --region us-west1 --with-oidc --fargate --external-dns-access --asg-access --full-ecr-access --alb-ingress-access

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

#124

Post by jokethrowaway »

Avalaxy wrote: post #101
planetafro wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know my dude, all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice. I agree with some other comments in this thread about a general fervor in the Enterprise space to "modernize" needlessly. This conversation usually lands on the company copying what everyone else is doing or what Gartner tells them to do. Cue "D…

> all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice I don't agree. I spun up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, which was indeed easy. But then I had to figure out how to write the correct deployment scripts to deploy my docker containers to it, and how to configure all the security stuff. After more than a week of tryin…

Azure is generally the worst (their new container offering looks better though)

If you try digital ocean k8s offering it's fairly straightforward.

Google cloud was the first to offer a decent k8s as a service, if I recall correctly. We didn't have DevOps back in 2015 and we were on GCloud.

Personally I don't pick k8s just because it's heavy to run and I don't want to waste machines (plain docker is good enough for a large part of what people actually need). Sometimes in a project when I can't figure something out with just docker, I just bite the bullet and install k0s.

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

#125

Post by oxplot »

Someone put it nicely when they said Kubernetes is like an operating system for containers. If you take linux as an analogy, it's clearly a non-trivial investment to learn linux and learn enough to be effective and efficient in it. Further time perhaps needed to achieve the productivity, functionality and performance of what you were used to on Mac or Windows.

Kubernetes definitely achieves this goal well, and in a relatively portable way. But just like any other engineering decision, you should evaluate the trade offs of learning a completely new OS just to get a simple web site up, versus running a nginx instance with bunch of cgi scripts.

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

#126

Post by crucialfelix »

Avalaxy wrote: post #101
planetafro wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know my dude, all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice. I agree with some other comments in this thread about a general fervor in the Enterprise space to "modernize" needlessly. This conversation usually lands on the company copying what everyone else is doing or what Gartner tells them to do. Cue "D…

> all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice I don't agree. I spun up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, which was indeed easy. But then I had to figure out how to write the correct deployment scripts to deploy my docker containers to it, and how to configure all the security stuff. After more than a week of tryin…

And you probably didn't even get to TLS and or authenticated communication between containers, CI/CD, canary deployments, observability, monitoring etc.

What we need is a Next.js for Kubernetes. Something that delivers a full stack solution on top of base Kubernetes.

The core system is great, but we need to replace these DevOps with a framework or platform.

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

jmillikin wrote: post #112
throwaway787544 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but instead that operational load of running in-house software should be borne primarily by the developers of that software Go back and read a few DevOps books and blogs by the founders of it. We will always need separate disciplines for dev and ops, just like we need mechanical engineers and mechanics/racecar drivers. But we need them to work together and communicate better to solve problems better and not throw d…

My second job in large-scale software was at Google, which used the "DevOps model" since before DevOps was named. I have no need to read a blog on it. You want the person who designs the car to know what a car is , and to be able to diagnose basic issues like "the fuel gauge says 'empty' and engine won't start". And there's no analogy to an Indy car driver in software, every distributed system is self-driving. The mo…

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by hukl »

Kubernetes and co do not reduce the amount of work - it’s just shifted to the next abstraction layer. Before when DevOps meant „you build it - you run it“ we removed dedicated ops teams to which the code was thrown over the fence and to reduce the animosity and friction between dev and ops. This was great but now all the hips companies have dedicated ops teams only that they are now called „platform teams“. Instead of code artefacts it is now containers that are thrown over the fence and now the ops part became so complex that separating dev and ops again seems reasonable. Luckily for me I managed to keep the good old DevOps of working, developing code and running it or bare metal servers with FreeBSD and Jails - even converting an existing Kubernetes setup back to bare metal. In my opinion the platformisation of the internet infrastructure isn’t a desirable state, monocultures are too and for the vast majority of projects kubernetes is overkill as they won’t ever reach the scale that would justify a kubernetes setup. It‘s like the milage fear for EV cars - but I guess everyone wants to hit facebook or google scale and that desire misinforms the early infrastructure architecture. That is just my 40 years old grey beard view which you can happily ignore whilst flying amongst the clouds :)

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

#129

Post by belter »

throwaway7865 wrote: post #123
planetafro wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know my dude, all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice. I agree with some other comments in this thread about a general fervor in the Enterprise space to "modernize" needlessly. This conversation usually lands on the company copying what everyone else is doing or what Gartner tells them to do. Cue "D…

Literally a one-liner for AWS EKS: eksctl create cluster --name mycluster --region us-west1 --with-oidc --fargate --external-dns-access --asg-access --full-ecr-access --alb-ingress-access

That is a quick and short line.

Now the fun starts:"Kubernetes Failure Stories"

https://k8s.af/

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

#130

Post by throwaway894345 »

nprateem wrote: post #105
nine_k wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good point: tools made by giants for giants, such as Kubernetes, Bazel, etc, may not make sense for a smaller operation. But what would you suggest in lieu of Kubernetes? What would save work for a shop which is not yet a giant but has already overgrown the capabilities of 2-3 manually managed boxes / instances? I can think of several options. Management by Ansible / Saltstack / Chef can easily become a rabbit…

A cloud service that can run containers directly, e.g. Amazon ACS, Google Cloud Run, etc.

> e.g. Amazon ACS

It's "Amazon ECS", and it works pretty well for standard fare CRUD web services, but more complex use cases quickly end up pulling in more and more AWS services (for example, if you need to run a cron job, you can use EventBridge to trigger an ECS task or just do it all with Lambda). This isn't dramatically worse--it's mostly just different. Kubernetes APIs are more consistent than in AWS, and Kubernetes tends to be more flexible and less limited than AWS. It's also much easier to extend Kubernetes or find a pre-existing extension than in AWS. But mostly it's not going to make or break your project one way or the other.

If you're just running CRUD web services, this is fine, but if you need to spin up a background job or do more complex orchestration then it can quickly become advantageous to

Post reply on HN