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I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

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Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#61

Post by dikei »

paxys wrote: post #48

> Kubernetes comes with substantial infrastructure costs that go beyond DevOps and management time. The high cost arises from needing to provision a bare-bones cluster with redundant management nodes. That's your problem right there. You really don't want to be setting up and managing a cluster from scratch for anything less than a datacenter-scale operation. If you are already on a cloud provider just use their mana…

Even for on-prem scenario, I'd rather maintain a K8S control plane and let developer teams manage their own apps deployment in their own little namespace, than provisioning a bunch of new VMs each time a team need some services deployed.

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#62

Post by igor47 »

czhu12 wrote: post #44

I'm not sure google cloud run can be considered a fair comparison to Kubernetes. It would be like saying AWS Lambda is a lot easier to use than EC2. I've used both Kubernetes and GCR at the current company I cofounded, and theres pros and cons to both. (Team of about 10 engineers) GCR was simple to run simple workloads, but, an out of the box Postgres database can't just handle unlimited connections and so connecting…

Why are GCR and pgbouncer incompatible? Could you run a pgbouncer instance in GCR?

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#64

Post by AznHisoka »

valenterry wrote: post #50
bruce511 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting set of requirements though. If that is indeed your set of requirements then perhaps Kubernetes is a good choice. But the set seems somewhat arbitrary. Can you reduce it further? What if you don't require 2 cloud providers? What if you don't need zero-downtime? Indeed given that you have 4 machines (2 instances, x 2 providers) could a human manage this? Is Kubernetes overkill? I ask this merely t…

> Can you reduce it further? What if you don't require 2 cloud providers? What if you don't need zero-downtime? I think the "2 cloud providers" criteria is maybe negotiable. Also, maybe there was a misunderstanding: I didn't mean to say I want to run it on two cloud providers. But rather that I run it on one of them but I could easily migrate to the other one if necessary. The zero-downtime one isn't. It's not necess…

I disagree with that last part. By default, having a few seconds downtime is not complex. The easiest thing you could do to a server is restart it. Its literally just a restart!

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#65

Post by Spivak »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #42

People talk about Kubernetes as container orchestration, but I think that's kind of backwards. Kubernetes is a tool for creating computer clusters. Hence the name "Borg" (Kubernetes's grandpa) referring to assimilating heterogeneous hardware into a collective entity. Containers are an implementation detail. Do you need a computer cluster? If so k8s is pretty great. If you don't care about redundancy and can get all t…

This has got to be the most out there k8s take I've read in a while. k8s doesn't save you from learning your cloud providers infrastructure, you have to learn k8s in addition to your cloud provider's infrastructure. It's all ALBs, ASGs, Security Groups, EBS Volumbes and IAM policy underneath and k8s, while very clever, isn't so clever as to abstract much of any of it away from you. On EKS you get to enjoy more odd limitations with your nodes than EC2 would give you on its own.

You're already building on a cluster, your cloud provider's hypervisor. They'll literally build virtual compute of any size and shape for you on demand out of heterogeneous hardware and the security guarantees are much stronger than colocated containers on k8s nodes.

There are quite a few steps between single server and k8s.

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#66

Post by InvaderFizz »

shrubble wrote: post #16
valenterry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, let's say you want to deploy server instances. Let's keep it simple and say you want to have 2 instances running. You want to have zero-downtime-deployment. And you want to have these 2 instances be able to access configuration (that contains secrets). You want load balancing, with the option to integrate an external load balancer. And, last, you want to be able to run this setup both locally and also on at least…

Do you know of actual (not hypothetical) cases, where you could "flip a switch" and run the exact same Kubernetes setups on 2 different cloud providers?

I run clusters on OKE, EKS, and GKE. Code overlap is like 99% with the only real differences all around ingress load balancers.

Kubernetes is what has provided us the abstraction layer to do multicloud in our SaaS. Once you are outside the k8s control plane, it is wildly different, but inside is very consistent.

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#67

Post by JohnMakin »

I don't understand how these posts exist when much of my consulting and career for the last few years has been on companies that have basically set up a bare bones out of the manual EKS/GCP solution and just essentially let it sit for 3+ years untouched until it got to a crisis. That to me as a systems engineer is nuts and a testament to how good this stuff is when you get it even kind of right. Of course, I'm referring to managed systems. Doing Kubernetes from scratch I would not dream of doing.

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#68

Post by QuiDortDine »

osigurdson wrote: post #32
valenterry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, let's say you want to deploy server instances. Let's keep it simple and say you want to have 2 instances running. You want to have zero-downtime-deployment. And you want to have these 2 instances be able to access configuration (that contains secrets). You want load balancing, with the option to integrate an external load balancer. And, last, you want to be able to run this setup both locally and also on at least…

"Imagine you are in a rubber raft, you are surrounded by sharks, and the raft just sprung a massive leak - what do you do?". The answer, of course, is to stop imagining. Most people on the "just use bash scripts and duct tape" side of things assume that you really don't need these features, that your customers are ok with downtime and generally that the project that you are working on is just your personal cat photo…

Yep. I'm one of 2 Devops at an R&D company with about 100 employees. They need these services for development, if an important service goes down you can multiply that downtime by 100, turning hours into man-days and days into man-months. K8 is simply the easiest way to reduce the risk of having to plead for your job.

I guess most businesses are smaller than this, but at what size do you start to need reliability for your internal services?

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#69

Post by czhu12 »

igor47 wrote: post #62
czhu12 wrote: post #44

I'm not sure google cloud run can be considered a fair comparison to Kubernetes. It would be like saying AWS Lambda is a lot easier to use than EC2. I've used both Kubernetes and GCR at the current company I cofounded, and theres pros and cons to both. (Team of about 10 engineers) GCR was simple to run simple workloads, but, an out of the box Postgres database can't just handle unlimited connections and so connecting…

Why are GCR and pgbouncer incompatible? Could you run a pgbouncer instance in GCR?

I’m not an expert, but from what I understand, the standard set up is like:

4x(Web processes) -> 1x(pgbouncer) -> database

This ensures that the pgbouncer instance is effectively multiplexing all the connections across your whole fleet.

In each individual web process, you can have another shared connection pool.

This is how we set it up

Re: I Didn't Need Kubernetes, and You Probably Don't Either

#70

Post by lkjdsklf »

valenterry wrote: post #12
lkrubner wrote: post #3

Interesting that the mania for over-investment in devops is beginning to abate. Here on Hacker News I was a steady critic of both Docker and Kubernetes, going to at least 2017, but most of these posts were unpopular. I have to go back to 2019 to find one that sparked a conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20371961 The stuff I posted about Kubernetes did not draw a conversation, but I was simply document…

So, let's say you want to deploy server instances. Let's keep it simple and say you want to have 2 instances running. You want to have zero-downtime-deployment. And you want to have these 2 instances be able to access configuration (that contains secrets). You want load balancing, with the option to integrate an external load balancer. And, last, you want to be able to run this setup both locally and also on at least…

We’ve been deploying software like this for a long ass time before kubernetes.

There’s shitloads of solutions.

It’s like minutes of clicking in a ui of any cloud provider to do any of that. So doing it multiple times is a non issue.

Or automate it with like 30 lines of bash. Or chef. Or puppet. Or salt. Or ansible. Or terraform. Or or or or or.

Kubernetes brings in a lot of nonsense that isn’t worth the tradeoff for most software.

If you feel it makes your life better, then great!

But there’s way simpler solutions that work for most things

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