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

benhouston3d.com

151–160 of 436 posts

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

#151

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…

You know that you can scale servers just as well, you can use good practices with scripts and deployments in bash and having them documented and in version control.

Equating bash scripts and running servers to duct taping and poor engineering vs k8s yaml being „proper engineering„ is well wrong.

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

#152
post #90

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 j…

Once it gets hard to run the needed services for all the applications in the organisation/team on your development machine it'll start to look more attractive to turn to Docker/Podman and the like, and that's when automatic tests and deploys built on disgusting YAML starts to make more sense.

I've been at a place where the two main applications were tightly coupled with several support systems and they all were dependent on one or more of Oracle DB, Postgres, Redis, JBoss, Tibco EMS and quite a bit more. Good luck using your development device to boot and run the test suite without containers. Before that team started putting stuff in containers they used the CI/CD environment to run the full set of tests, so they needed to do a PR, get it accepted, maybe wait for someone else's test run to finish, then watch it run, and if something blew, go back to commit, push to PR, &c. all over again.

Quite the nuisance. A full test suite had a run time of about an hour too. When I left we'd pushed it to forty minutes on our dev machines. They didn't use raw Kubernetes though, they had RedHat buy-in and used OpenShift, which is a bit more sane. But it's still a YAML nightmare that cuts you with a thousand inscrutable error messages.

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

#153
post #90

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 j…

Sorry to have to tell you this, but you’re old. Your neural plasticity has gone down and you feel like you have seen it al before. As a result you cling to the old and never feel like you grasp the new. The only reasonable thing to is to acknowledge and accept this and try not let it get in your way.

Our generation has seen many things before, but at the same time the world has completely changed and it’s led to the people growing up in it to be different.

You and me didn’t fully grasp CPUs anymore. Some people today don’t grasp all the details of the abstractions below K8s anymore and use it when perhaps something simpler (in architecture , not necessarily in use!) could do it better. And yet, they build wonderous things. Without editing php.ini and messing up 2 services to get one working.

Do I think K8s is the end all? Certainly not, I agree it’s sometimes overkill. But I bet you’ll like it’s follow-up tech even less. It is the way of things.

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

#154
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am running VPSes at our small startup-ish company on IaaS cloud. Every time we get a new guy I have to explain that we are already „in cloud” there is no need to „move to cloud”.

Do they mean PAAS vs IAAS when they say "move to cloud"?

Mostly business guys don’t know the difference but we are running on local cloud provider and they think of it is not on Azure or AWS it is not in cloud - they understand that we run stuff on servers but they also don’t understand VPS is IaaS.

Developers want to use PaaS and also AWS or Azure so they can put it on their resume for the future.

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

#155
post #90

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 j…

Sorry to have to tell you this, but you’re old. Your neural plasticity has gone down and you feel like you have seen it al before. As a result you cling to the old and never feel like you grasp the new. The only reasonable thing to is to acknowledge and accept this and try not let it get in your way. Our generation has seen many things before, but at the same time the world has completely changed and it’s led to the…

> Is K8s the end all? Certainly not, I agree it’s sometimes overkill. But I bet you’ll like it’s follow-up tech even less. It is the way of things.

I agree with your analysis.

People wanna talk up about how good the old days were plugging cables into racks but it's really laborious and can take days to debug that a faulty network switch is the cause of these weird packet drop issues seen sporadically on hot days.

Same as people saying 'oh yeah calculators are too complicated, pen and paper is what kids should be learning'.

It's the tide of change

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

#156
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would buy the book. Just translate all "new language" concepts into well known concepts from networking and system administration. It would be best seller. If I would only have a penny for each time I wasted hours trying to figure out what something in "modern IT" is, just to figure out that I already knew what it is, but it was well hidden under layers of newspeak...

The book I read on K8S written by a core maintainer made is very clear.

Is it this one, Kubernetes: Up and Running, 3rd Edition by Brendan Burns, Joe Beda, Kelsey Hightower, Lachlan Evenson from 2022? https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/kubernetes-up-and/97810...

(edit: found the 3rd edition)

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

#157
post #103
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just the hype moving on. Every generation has to make similar mistakes again and again. I am sure if we had the opportunity and the hype was there we would've used k8s in 2005 as well. The same thing is true for e.g. JavaScript on the frontend. I am currently migrating a project from React to HTMX. Suddenly there is no build step anymore. Some people were like: "That's possible?" Yes, yes it is and it turns out…

where does tailwind stand on this? you can use it without a build step but it's strongly recommended in production

A build step in your pipeline is fine because, chances are, you already have a build step in there.

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

#158
post #98

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…

What is the container orchestration tool of choice beyond docker swarm, then?

Is nomad still around?

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

#159
post #90

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 j…

I'll let you in on the joke. The joke is the demand for 100% availability and instant gratification. we're making services where anything less than 4 nines, which is 5 minutes month, is deemed unacceptable. three nines is 10 minutes a week. two nines is 15 minutes a day. there are some things that are important enough that you can't take a coffee break and wait for, but Kubernetes lets you push four nines of availabi…

Are you the only one waiting on your app if it goes down?

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

#160
This article kinda reads like "I didn't need HA, and you probably don't either". HA isn't necessary, but if you want a reliable system that will be online without being woken up at 3am (assuming you even have alerts at that point), you're better off with HA.

Similarly, you don't need Kubernetes, but if you want something that makes developer's life's easier, makes it easy to use a singular API, has many, many integrations and tooling, then you're better off with K8s. Sure, you can go with VMs, but now you have to scale and manage your application on a per VM level instead of per container. You have to think about a lot of cloud specific services, network policies, IAMs, I don't know what else, scaling.

I guess what I'm saying, you always have the option of writing in Assembly, but why would you when you can have a higher level language that abstracts most of it away. Yes, the maintenance burden on the devops/platform team is higher, but it's so much easier for users of the platform to use said platform.

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