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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?

#271

Post by OJFord »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #239
jstream67 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are on AWS you should check out ECS Fargate (serverless). It is really really good. Probably one of their more polished products. If you want to stay on the Kubernetes route check out k3s. Super easy to setup and usable for small production workloads

As a security engineer, I always cringe when anything involving containers is referred to as "serverless". I always thought that one of the advantages of going serverless was that you didn't have to worry about keeping the underlying operating system up-to-date. No needing to do a monthly "sudo apt update && apt upgrade" or whatever. But containers throw that all away when container images enter the world. Instead of…

Is anyone's goal of 'serverless' that they no longer have to deal with updating the OS?

Most would say even a server-ful system (k8s, or whatever) should be considered 'cattle not pets' with immutable nodes replaced as needed anyway. No update, just replace. Just like building a new image and having new pods (or serverless whatevers) pull it.

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

#272

Post by OJFord »

tapoxi wrote: post #15

From my experience, Kubernetes drastically reduces the number of DevOps people required. My current place has a team of 5, compared to a similarly sized, vmware-centric place I worked at a decade ago with a team of 14. But DevOps means many things because it's not clearly defined, which also makes it difficult to hire for. It's a "jack-of-all-trades" role that people somehow fell into and decided to do instead of mor…

> CS programs are really bad at covering these fundamentals. Students aren't learning such basics as version control, ci/cd, cloud platforms, linux, etc.

Good. Those aren't 'fundamentals' of 'CS'.

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

#273

Post by tauwauwau »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #122
Avalaxy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prett…

It took me 4-5 hours to read and understand first few chapters of Kubernetes in action, I annotated a lot text as notes on the Oreily site, but didn't have to go back to it. I didn't have to do any security and account management stuff, it was being done by someone else. After 3 years of working with plain Kubernetes and OpenShift, I still didn't have to go back to the book. Basic concepts in Kubernetes are easy to understand, if you're working as a developer to deploy your apps in it and not in DevOps managing it.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/kubernetes-in-action/97...

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

#274

Post by rufius »

The problems weren’t simplified. The problems were collected together into a single large platform.

However, as with most large platforms, they require ceremonies and priests (devops engineers). Someone has to make the offerings.

Much as people would like to believe, you don’t reduce complexity, you just shuffle it around and there’s an exchange rate. Even with solutions like Fly.io, you’re not getting rid of complexity in aggregate, you’re paying them to manage it (I.e. the exchange rate).

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

#275

Post by bmn__ »

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.

> Technically YAML is a superset of JSON

That's false. http://p3rl.org/JSON::XS#JSON-and-YAML

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

#276

Post by AaronM »

throwaway7865 wrote: post #49
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…

We’ve moved a small-scale business to Kubernetes and it made our lives much easier. 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 env…

We don't have an issue with that last point, lots of EC2 EKS nodes and they don't fail randomly. Were you using resources and limits correctly? EKS nodes can fall over randomly if you don't reserve resources on the nodes for system processes, and your workloads eat up all the resources. That's probably not well documented either.

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

#277

Post by dosethree »

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…

You don't even end up spending time on Kubernetes, because k8s is just part of the solution, a container scheduler. You have to bring logs, monitoring, a container registry ,as well as a CI system with custom jobs and do integration of everything.

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

#278

Post by dosethree »

dusanh wrote: post #38
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?

K8s ate everyone else. The alternative is to use a heroku like sass

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

#279

Post by tbrownaw »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #237
sgarland wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Kubernetes' docs[0] discuss using imperative commands, I think it's a fairly reasonable way to describe it. [0] https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/manage-kubernetes-objects/i...

Why is applying a full manifest “declarative” but applying a patch is “imperative”? That’s clearly an error.

Applying a full manifest is "this is your state now".

Applying a patch is "make these changes to your existing state".

That dependency on existing state is a difference, and it seems to map reasonably well to what declarative/imperative seem to usually be used to mean in this context.

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

#280

Post by dijit »

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…

> 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.

Cool, you probably know my old colleague Hugo, he was one of the first SRE's at Google in a team of like 20 or so. (I wasn't there, could be mistaken).

Anyway, what "Production" was, is different than what devops is. DevOps is different things to different people. In the beginning it was "What happens when systems administrators do Agile".

(Genuinely), Confusion came about because of the "100 deploys a day" talk and the conference being called "dev ops days" (to include developers).

The two things got conflated and now everyone thinks devops are.. well, build engineers or sysadmins or developers who learned a bit of bash and terraform.

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