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

benhouston3d.com

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

#81

Post by solatic »

Cloud Run is fine if you're a small startup and you're thinking about your monthly bill in three-figure or even four-figure terms.

Like most serverless solutions, it does not permit you to control egress traffic. There are no firewall controls exposed to you, so you can't configure something along the lines of "I know my service needs to connect to a database, that's permitted, all other egress attempts are forbidden", which is a foundational component of security architecture that understands that getting attacked is a matter of time and security is something you build in layers. EDIT: apparently I'm wrong on Cloud Run not being deployable within a VPC! See below.

GCP and other cloud providers have plenty of storage products that only work inside a VPC. Cloud SQL. Memorystore. MongoDB Atlas (excluding the expensive and unscalable serverless option). Your engineers are probably going to want to use one or some of them.

Eventually you will need a VPC. You will need to deploy compute inside the VPC. Managed Kubernetes solutions make that much easier. But 90% of startups fail, so 95% of startups will fail before they get to this point. YMMV.

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

#82

Post by lmm »

anon7000 wrote: post #59
kccqzy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at tiny startups before. Tiny startups don't need zero-downtime-deployment. They don't have enough traffic to need load balancing. Especially when you are running locally, you don't need any of these.

Tiny startups can’t afford to loose customers because they can’t scale though, right? Who is going to invest in a company that isn’t building for scale? Tiny startups are rarely trying to build projects for small customer bases (eg little scaling required.) They’re trying to be the next unicorn. So they should probably make sure they can easily scale away from tossing everything on the same server

> Tiny startups can’t afford to loose customers because they can’t scale though, right? Who is going to invest in a company that isn’t building for scale?

Having too many (or too big) customers to handle is a nice problem to have, and one you can generally solve when you get there. There are a handful of giant customers that would want you to be giant from day 1, but those customers are very difficult to land and probably not worth the effort.

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

#83

Post by sobellian »

nicce wrote: post #74
sobellian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at a few tiny startups, and I've both manually administered a single server and run small k8s clusters. k8s is way easier. I think I've spent 1, maybe 2 hours on devops this year. It's not a full-time job, it's not a part-time job, it's not even an unpaid internship. Perhaps at a bigger company with more resources and odd requirements...

But how much this costs extra? Sounds like you are using cloud-provided k8s.

EKS is priced at $876 / yr / cluster at current rates.

Negligible for me personally, it's much less than either our EC2 or RDS costs.

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

#84

Post by ikiris »

threeseed wrote: post #19
semitones wrote: post #15

Kubernetes has a steep learning curve, and certainly a lot of complexity, but when used appropriately for the right case, by god it's glorious

Kubernetes has a proportional learning curve. If you're used to managing platforms e.g. networking, load balancers, security etc. then it's intuitive and easy. If you're used to everything being managed for you then it will feel steep.

Nah the difference between managing k8 and the system it was based on is VASTLY different. K8 is much harder than it needs to be because there wasn't tooling for a long time to manage it well. Going from google internal to K8 is incredibly painful.

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

#85

Post by bspammer »

solatic wrote: post #81

Cloud Run is fine if you're a small startup and you're thinking about your monthly bill in three-figure or even four-figure terms. Like most serverless solutions, it does not permit you to control egress traffic. There are no firewall controls exposed to you, so you can't configure something along the lines of "I know my service needs to connect to a database, that's permitted, all other egress attempts are forbidden…

I’m surprised Cloud Run doesn’t let you do this. You can put an AWS lambda in a VPC no problem.

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

#86

Post by solatic »

spockz wrote: post #76
dikei wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can imagine. Do you have complete automation setup around maintaining the cluster? We are now on-prem using “pet” clusters with namespace as a service automated on it. This causes all kinds of issues with different workloads with different performance characteristics and requirements. They also share ingress and egress nodes so impact on those has a large blast radius. This leads to more rules and requirements. Hav…

> This causes all kinds of issues with different workloads with different performance characteristics and requirements.

Most of these issues can be fixed by setting resource requests equal to limits and using integer CPU values to guarantee QoS. You should also have an interface with developers explaining which nodes in your datacenter have which characteristics, using node labels and taints, and force developers to pick specific node groups as such by specifying node affinity and tolerations, by not bringing online nodes without taints.

> They also share ingress and egress nodes so impact on those has a large blast radius.

This is true regardless of whether or not you use Kubernetes.

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

#88

Post by jdlshore »

anon7000 wrote: post #59
kccqzy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at tiny startups before. Tiny startups don't need zero-downtime-deployment. They don't have enough traffic to need load balancing. Especially when you are running locally, you don't need any of these.

Tiny startups can’t afford to loose customers because they can’t scale though, right? Who is going to invest in a company that isn’t building for scale? Tiny startups are rarely trying to build projects for small customer bases (eg little scaling required.) They’re trying to be the next unicorn. So they should probably make sure they can easily scale away from tossing everything on the same server

Startups need product-market fit before they need scale. It’s incredibly hard to come by and most won’t get it. Their number one priority should be to run as many customer acquisition experiments as possible for as little as possible. Every hour they spend on scale before they need it is an hour less of runway.

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

#89

Post by rtpg »

dikei wrote: post #61
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.

Even as a K8s hater, this is a pretty salient point.

If you are serious about minimizing ops work, you can make sure people are deploying things in very simple ways, and in that world you are looking at _very easy_ deployment strategies relative to having to wire up VMs over and over again.

Just feels like lots of devs will take whatever random configs they find online and throw them over the fence, so now you just have a big tangled mess for your CRUD app.

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

#90

Post by tombert »

I’ve come to the conclusion that I hate “cloud shit”, and a small part of me is convinced that literally no one actually likes it, and everyone is playing a joke on me.

I have set up about a dozen rack mount servers in my life, installing basically every flavor of Unix and Linux and message busses under the sun in the process, but I still get confused by all the Kubectl commands and GCP integration with it.

I might just be stupid, but it feels like all I ever do with Kubernetes is update and break YAML files, and then spend a day fixing them by copy-pasting increasingly-convoluted things on stackexchange. I cannot imagine how anyone goes to work and actually enjoys working in Kubernetes, though I guess someone must in terms of “law of large numbers”.

If I ever start a company, I am going to work my damndest to avoid “cloud integration crap” as possible. Just have a VM or a physical server and let me install everything myself. If I get to tens of millions of users, maybe I’ll worry about it then.

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