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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

#261

Post by mkesper »

tootubular wrote: post #34
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…

My personal goto-solution for those requirements -- well 1 cloud provider, I'll follow up on that in a second -- would be using ECS or an equivalent service. I see the OP was a critic of Docker as well, but for me, ECS hits a sweet spot. I know the compute is at a premium, but at least in my use-cases, it's so far been a sensible trade. About the 2 cloud providers bit. Is that a common thing? I get wanting migrate aw…

Last time I checked ECS was even more expensive than using Lambda but without the ability of fast starting your container, so I really don't get the niche it fits into, compared to Lambda on one side and self-hosting docker on minimal EC2 instances on the other side.

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

#262

Post by HPsquared »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #231
jmb99 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have pretty much the exact same opinion, right down to “cloud shit” (I have even used that exact term at work to multiple levels of management, specifically “I’m not working on cloud shit, you know what I like working on and I’ll do pretty much anything else, but no cloud shit”). I have worked on too many projects where all you need is a 4-8 vCPU VM running nginx and some external database, but for some reasons the…

These comments: > He didn’t believe it was possible to have this kind of performance in a “legacy monolithic” (his words) application. > I think it’s so heavily ingrained in most cloud/web developers that this is the only option that they will not even entertain the thought that it can be done another way. One thing that I need to remind myself of periodically: The amount of work that a modern 1U server can do in 202…

It's nice to think about the amount of work done by game engines, for instance. Factorio is a nice example, or anything graphics-heavy.

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

#263

Post by wordofx »

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…

0 downtime. Jesus Christ. Nginx and HAProxy solved this shit decades ago. You can drop out a server or group. Deploy it. Add it back in. With a single telnet command. You don’t need junk containers to solve things like “0 downtime deployments”. That was a solved problem.

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

#264

Post by torginus »

regularfry wrote: post #254
torginus wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes starts sucking at first sight and is kind of the sign of the ailment of modern times. Let me try to explain: First, you encounter the biggest impedance mismatch between cloud and on prem: Kubernetes works with pods, while AWS works with instances as the unit of useful work, so they must map to each other, right? Wrong, first each instance needs to run a Kubernetes node, which duplicates the management infr…

It really, really wants a higher-level abstraction layer over the top of it. I can see how you'd build something heroku-like with it, but exposing app developers to it just seems cruel.

Thing is, k8s is already an abstraction layer on top of something like AWS or GCP

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

#265

Post by t-writescode »

threeseed wrote: post #184
t-writescode wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is only true if the original k8s cluster you're operating against was written by an expert and laid out as such. If you're entering into k8s land with someone else's very complicated mess across hundreds of files, you're going to be in for a bad time. A big problem, I feel, is that if you don't have an expert design the k8s system from the start, it's just going to be a horrible time; and, many people, w…

The exact can be said for your Terraform, Pulumi, Shell scripts etc. Not to mention unique config for every component and piece of infrastructure. At least Kubernetes is all YAML, consistent and can be tested locally.

My experience either k8s is with terraform building the k8s environment for me :D

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

#266

Post by coldtea »

voidfunc wrote: post #107
tombert wrote: 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'm always kind of blown away by experiences like this. Admittedly, I've been using Kubernetes since the early days and I manage an Infra team that operates a couple thousand self-managed Kubernetes clusters so... expert blindness at work. Before that I did everything from golden images to pushing changes via rsync and kicking a script to deploy. Maybe it's because I adopted early and have grown with the technology i…

>Before that I did everything from golden images to pushing changes via rsync and kicking a script to deploy.

Sounds like a great KISS solution. Why did it regress into Kubernetes?

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

#267

Post by coldtea »

mitjam wrote: post #148
voidfunc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always kind of blown away by experiences like this. Admittedly, I've been using Kubernetes since the early days and I manage an Infra team that operates a couple thousand self-managed Kubernetes clusters so... expert blindness at work. Before that I did everything from golden images to pushing changes via rsync and kicking a script to deploy. Maybe it's because I adopted early and have grown with the technology i…

Absolutely, a reasonably sophisticated scalable app platform looks like a half-baked and undocumented reimagination of Kubernetes. Admittedly: The ecosystem is huge and less is more in most cases, but the foundation is cohesive and sane. Would love to read the k8s for greybeards book.

>Absolutely, a reasonably sophisticated scalable app platform looks like a half-baked and undocumented reimagination of Kubernetes.

Or maybe Kubernetes looks like a committee designed, everything and the kitchen sink, over-engineered, second system effect, second system effect suffering, YAGNI P.O.S., that only the kind of "enterprise" mindset that really enjoyed J2EE in 2004 and XML/SOAP vs JSON/REST would love...

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

#268

Post by supersixirene »

globular-toast wrote: post #178
caseyohara wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are proving the point; there are very, very few applications that need to run on two cloud providers. If you do, sure, use Kubernetes if that makes your job easier. For the other 99% of applications, it’s overkill. Apart from that requirement, all of this is very doable with EC2 instances behind an ALB, each running nginx as a reverse proxy to an application server with hot restarting (e.g. Puma) launched…

Hmm, let's see, so you've got to know: EC2, ALB, Nginx, Puma, Systemd, then presumably something like Terraform and Ansible to deploy those configs, or write a custom set of bash scripts. And all of that and you're tied to one cloud provider. Or, instead of reinventing the same wheels for Nth time, I could just use a set of abstractions that work for 99% of network services out there, on any cloud or bare metal. That…

[dead]

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

#269

Post by supersixirene »

lkjdsklf wrote: post #134
jdlshore wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

while true, zero downtime deployments is... trivial... even for a tiny startup.. So you might as well do it.

Zero downtime deployments were a thing long before K8S

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

#270

Post by antihero »

tombert wrote: 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 think a good compromise is building your applications in a containerised manner so that you can simply run them with docker-compose, but then if it turns out you need some heavy scale, it's merely a case of switching the underlying infrastructure.

That said, my experience has been fairly different. Running microk8s on a VPS with some containers and an ingress just seems like a nice way to spin them up as pods and manage them. It really doesn't feel that complicated.

Once you integrate with cloud providers and you get more complex systems, sure, it gets more complex.

I much prefer the container paradigm for separating parts of apps out and managing dependencies and reproducibility. Having a bunch of raw servers with all the bullshit and drift and mutability that comes along with it feels far more like a headache to me than the abstraction of k8s or docker.

If you aren't deploying stuff with GitOps/IaC in 2024 I fear for anyone that has to manage or maintain it. 100% reproducibility and declarative infrastructure are wonderful things I could never come back from.

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