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

241–250 of 433 posts

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

#241

Post by throwaway2037 »

epivosism wrote: post #193
throwaway894345 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prett…

As an outsider, that command looks really easy to mess up. * shell interactions with quotes * double quotes * interpolating into image namespace with no autocomplete * easy to forget an argument * do you get autocomplete against the deployment name? Comparison: C# declaration of a complex type - it's less complex than the `kubectl` command above, but IDEs offer way more support to get it right. * var x = new List >()…

About quoting rules: We desperately needs static analysis or IDEs (Emacs plugins, whatever) that "explain" exactly what quotes do in a particular context. When I returned to C++ recently, I was blown away by Clang-Tidy (JetBrains CLion integration). Literally: Clang-Tidy seems to "know what you really want" and give intelligent suggestions. For someone whom is a very average C++ programmer, it instantly leveled me up! I could see the same for someone writing /bin/sh, /bin/ksh, /bin/bash shell commands. If the IDE could give some hints, it would be incredibly helpful to many.

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

#242

Post by varispeed »

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 also by design locks you in one of the cloud providers in a quite deceptive way. There is no singular interface for networking, so you cannot really port your infrastructure from cloud to bare metal for instance. Bare metal also was heavily underdeveloped, so setting it up was fragile and fiddly and quite limited.

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

#243

Post by dsr_ »

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…

The thread here full of people incorrecting each other about how to use Kubernetes seems pretty solid evidence for your thesis "it adds work".

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

#244

Post by trollied »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #30

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 proje…

I agree 100%. Keep things simpler, invest the $ that would have been spent on k8s staff on performance tuning courses & upskill your devs in squeezing every last millisecond out of a couple of dedicated servers. You can do lots with a couple of beefy machines if the software is tuned.

Everything has become so abstracted away these days that performance isn’t even a consideration because people don’t understand the full stack. And I don’t mean “full stack” as it’s slung around these days. EG: doing 20 round trips to the database looking up individual records (as each is an object code-side), when you could just do one. Things like that are opaque & many devs wouldn’t even care or know, but a little bit of education can make a huge difference.

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

#245

Post by devonbleak »

bborud wrote: post #213
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 could have been designed better to be easier to set up and use. Especially for ad-hoc or more casual use. If it is easy to use casually, people will use it more and they will learn how to use it faster. It is also easier to see why you would invest in learning to create more complex configurations. Pretty much every piece of software I've written in the past decade that tends to have configs in production can also…

It still comes back to right tool for the job. There's a perception in the market that k8s is the right tool for running all compute. As someone recently told me "I've been interviewing cloud people for 2 weeks and all I can find is people that want to run k8s all day."

k8s is not the right tool for every job. Most companies are not at the scale where they need to worry about the problems that it's trying to solve. But it's a cargo cult - they see the blog posts about how moving to k8s solves a bunch of problems that come up as you scale and decide they need to be solving all of those problems also even though there are simpler solutions at their current scale.

There's a bunch of other platforms out there that are way more opinionated and less "awkward" but they don't have the buzz that k8s has.

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

#246

Post by krapp »

rustyminnow wrote: post #235
heretogetout wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you about feeling dumb. I think some early decisions in the k8s ecosystem led to a lot of wasted time and effort, and this frustration. YAML: significant whitespace is always unwelcome but YAML also introduces unexpected problems, like how it deals with booleans. For example, say you have this array: foo: - x - y - z You might think this is an array of strings, but you'd be wrong. It's also difficult to read t…

Technically YAML is a superset of JSON - all valid JSON is valid YAML. So you could write all your configs in JSON and they'd work just fine.

This discussion from a couple of weeks ago suggests it isn't that simple: not all valid JSON is always valid YAML if your definition of superset requires that JSON would be parsed the same with a YAML parser as with a JSON parser.

If you're going to use JSON for config, it's better to use an actual JSON parser.

https://john-millikin.com/json-is-not-a-yaml-subset https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31406473

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

#248

Post by eeZah7Ux »

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…

> 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services

...until you need to debug something somewhere in the enormous stack.

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

#249

Post by ciguy »

In short - Kubernetes solves a lot of very complex problems. The problems are complex enough that the solutions are also complex and require specialized knowledge to implement well. Most teams using Kubernetes probably shouldn't be, but tech companies like to over-optimize for future scale.
Post reply on HN