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

361–370 of 433 posts

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

#361

Post by datavirtue »

rahkiin wrote: post #144
nokya wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

60 containers sounds like an architecture problem, not a Kubernetes problem. Kubernetes does not stop you from running 1 container in 1 pod receiving ingress and talking to a database.

It's the gateway drug

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

#362

Post by subsection1h »

mastazi wrote: post #337
dosethree wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my particular market sector it seems everyone is using some form of cloud functions (SAM, Serverless Framework etc), and migrating away from K8S/containers. Regarding PaaS stuff like Heroku, the only people I know that are still using that are solo hackers.

That's interesting. In the latest Who Is Hiring discussion, there seems to be more than 10 times as many references to Kubernetes compared to serverless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582796

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

#363

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

Shorn wrote: post #357
therealdrag0 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep very much so. Doing it wrong ™ applies to any deployment and shouldn’t be held against k8s. We have over a hundred services deployed in who knows how many pods in a dozen environments and it’s definitely not that unstable.

> it’s definitely not that unstable So how unstable is it?

Not at all unstable in my experience

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

#364

Post by ransom1538 »

jedberg wrote: post #323

DevOps is a philosophy, not a job role. It's the idea that developers deploy and operate their own code. An SRE is often someone who helps make that happen, by building the tools necessary for developers to operate their own code. In a small organization, you can get away with a sysadmin running a Kubernetes cluster to enable that. In a larger org you'll need SREs as well as Operations Engineers to build and maintain…

This an underrated comment right here. I think the entire industry is confused -- but they could have just read this comment.

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

#365

Post by rtpg »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #356
adra wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can probably be chalked up to youre-doing-it-wrong (sorry) but not knowing your precise scenario, it's hard to know what went wrong. Maybe really old versions misbehaved (only started a few years ago and its been smooth sailing), but I've never seen your problem on any of our stuff and we have dozens of different services on a bunch of languages/frameworks, and none of them just give up for no reason ( though a…

Yep very much so. Doing it wrong ™ applies to any deployment and shouldn’t be held against k8s. We have over a hundred services deployed in who knows how many pods in a dozen environments and it’s definitely not that unstable.

> Doing it wrong ™ applies to any deployment and shouldn’t be held against k8s

I think there's definitely a huge asterisk there if the tool makes it very easy to "do it wrong", hard to "do it right", etc.

Of course with k8s it's tough because it's capturing computation! Hard for it to "know" what one is trying to do inside the containers. And in the case of k8s the only thing I could think of that is ... kinda in that space is managing volumes, since it runs into the dilemna of adding persistence to ephemeral things.

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

#366

Post by rtpg »

jmillikin wrote: post #71
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…

The true happy path: you have a big monolith hungry for resources, several instances of the monolith, and you want to be able to relatively quickly spin up new instances (modulo provisioning new nodes) without having to jump through 100 hoops.

For all people talk about autoscaling and whatnot, just hitting some buttons/sending a couple commands manually and getting some temporary scaling for reason X (or a temporary container for reason Y) without messing with a bunch of admin consoles is very nice.

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

#367

Post by jghn »

jmillikin wrote: post #6

> 1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD > 2) external users: end users > > Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do > 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just > got more specialized). Both are called sysadmins. SRE is a specialized software engineering role -- you'd hire SREs if you wanted to create something like Kubernetes in-house, or do extensive customiza…

> DevOps is the idea that there shouldn't be separate "dev" and "ops" organizations,

I agree with this definition of DevOps. However the vast, vast, vaaaast majority of real life uses of the term "DevOps" I've seen are just rebranded sysadmins. Sometimes it at least implies a more engineering approach to their coding. But in these institutions the Devs and Ops are very much separate groups of people, unfortunately.

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

#368

Post by throwaway894345 »

kube-system wrote: post #318
jrx wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

kubectl apply on a directory full of yaml works fairly well for small stuff. Check it into git and it's version controlled. If you need something more flexible than that, try making your own helm chart. Helm will give you some text templating, pre and post hooks, some basic functions, and some versioning and rollback functionality. You can start simple by just pasting in your existing k8s yaml, and then just pull out…

kubectl apply on a directory doesn’t work because deleting a resource manifest won’t delete the corresponding resources.

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

#369

Post by smeagull »

fertrevino wrote: post #325
jeffwask wrote: post #77

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 mo…

The number of places that get the meaning of DevOps wrong is too high. So much that it is often easier to use it wrong in order to express an idea.

I do think there is a space for a developer team model that is easy to maintain, hard to screw up and gives say 80% of the productivity gains.

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

#370

Post by Layke1123 »

rtpg wrote: post #365
therealdrag0 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep very much so. Doing it wrong ™ applies to any deployment and shouldn’t be held against k8s. We have over a hundred services deployed in who knows how many pods in a dozen environments and it’s definitely not that unstable.

> Doing it wrong ™ applies to any deployment and shouldn’t be held against k8s I think there's definitely a huge asterisk there if the tool makes it very easy to "do it wrong", hard to "do it right", etc. Of course with k8s it's tough because it's capturing computation! Hard for it to "know" what one is trying to do inside the containers. And in the case of k8s the only thing I could think of that is ... kinda in tha…

I imagine it's akin to management expecting you to spend your off hours learning all this "great new tech" while they think working off hours is reading online articles on hacker news to "stay up to date".
Post reply on HN