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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?

#301

Post by devonkim »

Kubernetes in a sense is very similar to Linux back in the 2000s - it was nascent technology in a hot market that was still absolutely evolving. The difference now is that everyone knows the battle for the next tier of the platform is where people will be able to sell their value (look at RedHat selling to IBM for the saddled legacy of maintaining an OS as a tough growth proposition). For a while people thought that Hadoop would be the platform but it never grew to serve a big enough group's needs back in 2013-ish and coupled with the headaches of configuration management containerization hit and it's now combined at the intersection of OS, virtualization, CI, and every other thing people run applications on in general. It may be the most disruptive thing to our industry overall since the advent of Linux in this respect (people thought virtualization was it for a while and it's shown to have been minor comparatively).

A lot of this stuff really is trying to address the core problem we've had for a long time that probably won't ever end - "works fine on my computer."

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

#302

Post by OJFord »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #295
OJFord wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From a purely security standpoint, "updating your OS" and "updating your image" are equivalent. What matters to the security people are that you're running the latest OpenSSL that isn't vulnerable to the newest branded vulnerability. If you're truly "serverless" by my interpretation of it, then you wouldn't care. Your cloud provider will have updated their infrastructure, and that's all that matters.

Yeah I see what you're saying, that's a fair enough interpretation of it I just don't think it's the only one.

In fact almost nothing is serverless (well, the truth comes out! ;)) by that definition, since even Lambda has runtime versions to choose/upgrade, Managed-Acme has Acme versions, etc.

SES, SNS, SQS, etc. sure, but I suppose no compute, since you need libraries, and libraries have versions, and you can't have them (significantly/major versions) changing under your feet. (Or if they don't have versions they're of course destined to have known security holes.)

(Or it's not even about libraries if you want to say no you don't need libraries - it's just about having to interface with anything.)

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

#303

Post by esoterae »

devonkim wrote: post #301

Kubernetes in a sense is very similar to Linux back in the 2000s - it was nascent technology in a hot market that was still absolutely evolving. The difference now is that everyone knows the battle for the next tier of the platform is where people will be able to sell their value (look at RedHat selling to IBM for the saddled legacy of maintaining an OS as a tough growth proposition). For a while people thought that…

I have noticed a pattern that keeps popping up.. I've seen many orgs invoking docker/k8s simply as an abstraction layer to allow mapping of commit hashes in a repo to objects in deploy environments.

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

#304

Post by drakonka »

I think that K8s _could_ make the process of maintaining CI/build/deployment tasks much more hands-off and automated. But in practice we often use this new "power" as an opportunity to invent more fancy/smart things to do, taking advantage of it to the point where it requires as much if not more maintenance as whatever came before.

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

#305

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

> 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's also a Google engineer caliber solution. Lots of teams said “hey if Google engineers do it then it must be good!”…but forgot that they didn’t have the same in-house talent as Google.

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

#306

Post by dlp211 »

dijit wrote: post #261
blue_cookeh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> small- or medium-sized businesses, which might have 50,000 VMs or fewer Holy shit, is this considered small to medium enterprise now?

a single cluster supports approx 5,000 nodes, 110 pods per node~ The estimated maximum single cluster is 300,000 containers. That's pretty medium, I've ran more than a million processes before, and nomad has 1million containers as its challenge https://www.hashicorp.com/c1m borg can handle this easily.

I don't know anyone running 5k node K8S clusters. That said, borg (as an end user) appears to just keep scaling, but it uses a different model and makes different assumptions than K8S.

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

#307

Post by jen20 »

tbrownaw wrote: post #279
throwaway894345 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It isn’t though. It’s “please make the state look like this eventually”. You do not patch state, just spec. Controllers effect the changes.

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

#308

Post by lukeschlather »

jrx wrote: post #266
sgarland wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, do not manage deployments with imperative kubectl commands, I beg of you.

The question is: what tool to use? I'm a solo developer running a very small kube cluster for my hobby project. I very much wanted to have a declarative version controlled state of my cluster. Every time I try googling solutions I get flooded with some enterprise Saas offerings that do nothing I want. I managed my stateful sets/services for a while with terraform, but my experience was absolutely terrible and I have…

I'm a fan of emrichen, but simple text templating (Jinja) works almost as well. (j2cli means you can just provide a yaml file with per-stage configs.)

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

#309

Post by dlp211 »

lacker wrote: post #225
everfrustrated wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I might cynically offer it was "invented" to solve the problem of ex-googlers not having any useful immediately transferable skills as the Google internal tech stack had nothing in common with industry.

In 2005 Google search got into a sticky spot, where they were completely unable to deploy new versions of the search engine from the master branch of the code for a while, because there were performance regressions that nobody could find. Deployment and related things like "deploy a copy of the production configuration to these spare 2000 machines" were manual slogs. I was the noob on the team doing such important ye…

Borg is not K8S, K8S is not borg.

Borg is far more advanced in its scaling abilities.

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

#310

Post by mkoubaa »

gruez wrote: post #189
deeptote wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, "why technological innovation creates and transforms jobs, instead of causing unemployment".

...except that 400k in 1980 translates to 608k in 2017, if you factor in overall labor force size. That means even though there were 600k jobs "created", it's still a net loss. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV

This is a weak argument, since it ignores the productivity gains in all the industries that necessitated more accountants. Accountants don't only do each other's taxes, so more productivity in accountants is an indicator for a more productive economy
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