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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

#361

Post by tombert »

teekert wrote: post #153
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…

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…

I'm 33 dude, not exactly "old".

I never really liked the devops stuff even when I was 20. I have no doubt that I could get better with k8s, but it's decidedly not fun.

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

#362

Post by tombert »

teekert wrote: post #180
creesch wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a nice essay, it also is purely an emotional argument hanging together from assumptions and fallacies. Even if you are right in this instance, just brushing things off with the "you are old" argument will ensure that you end up in some horrible tech debt spaghetti mess in the future. Being critical of the infrastructure you deploy to is a good thing . Because for all the new things that do stick around,…

Well, I fully agree with you. Perhaps the -hate “cloud shit"- remark triggered me a bit. It's just such a 'drown the baby with the bathwater', curmudgeon thing to say. And, imho, it betrays age. It's like my grandfather saying, I hate all this digital stuff, "I will never put email on my phone because with emails come viruses." (Literal thing my father-in-law always claims, and perhaps he's not even wrong, he just st…

I don't think it betrays age really, I just think that a lot of this stuff with AWS and Azure and GCP is overly complicated. I am not convinced anyone actually enjoys working on it. I'm pretty sure that 21 year old me would have roughly the same opinion.

As I said in a sibling comment, you can genuinely get a bachelors degree in AWS or Azure [1], meaning that it's complicated enough to where someone thought it necessitated an entire college degree.

By "cloud shit", I don't mean "someone else hosting stuff" (which I tried to clarify by saying "give me a VM" at the end). I mostly think that having four hundred YAML files to do anything just sucks the life out of engineering. It wouldn't bother me too much if these tasks were just handled by the people who run devops, but I hate that since I am a "distributed systems engineer" that I have to LARP as an accountant and try and remember all this annoying arbitrary bureaucratic crap.

[1] https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/cloud-computing-bachel...

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

#363

Post by tombert »

tedk-42 wrote: post #155
teekert wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Sam…

I reject that comparison, I'm not really resistant to change, I'm resistant the awful bureaucratic crap that k8s and its ilk force you to use. It's not fun, as far as I can tell no one actually understands any of it (young or old), they just copy and past large blocks of YAML from blogs and documentation and then cross their fingers.

I'm not saying that plugging in cables and hoping power supplies don't die is "better" in any kind of objective sense, or even subjective sense really, I'm just saying that I hate this cloud cult that has decided that the only way to do anything is to add layers of annoying bureaucratic shit.

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

#364

Post by pdimitar »

khafra wrote: post #278
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…

Container orchestration is second nature to us SRE's, so it's easy to forget that the average dev probably only knows the syntax for deployments and one or two service manifests. And pods, of course

A factor for sure, but as a programmer I find that the discoverability of stuff in code is much higher than with k8s.

Give me access to a repo full of YAML files and I'm truly and completely lost and wouldn't even know where to begin.

YAML is simply not the right tool for this job. Sure you got used to it but that's exactly the point: you had to get used to it. It was not intuitive and it did not come naturally to you.

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

#365

Post by tombert »

Havoc wrote: post #295
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…

“let me install everything myself” doesn’t generalise well and gets messy even if you IaC it. There is a reason k8s gang keeps going on about “cattle not pets”. The starting assumptions and goals are fundamentally different vs “give me a physical server” Both have their place I think so not really one is right other is wrong

Everyone says this, but do we actually have data to back that up?

I feel like I spend so much time working around CloudSQL for postgres support in GCP at work, to a point where I'm not actually sure I'm saving a ton of time over running and managing it myself. That's probably not true, I'm sure there are edge cases that I'm not accounting for, but I'm a little tired of everyone acting like AWS and GCP and Azure are the "set it and forget it" thing that they advertise.

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

#366

Post by tombert »

tapoxi wrote: post #102
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…

This read as "old man yells at cloud" to me. I've managed a few thousand VMs in the past, and I'm extremely grateful for it. An image is built in CI, service declares what it needs, the scheduler just handles shit. I'm paged significantly less and things are predictable and consistent unlike the world of VMs where even your best attempt at configuration management would result in drift, because the CM system is only…

> But yes, Kubernetes is configured in YAML, and YAML kind of sucks, but you rarely do that.

I'm sorry, citation needed on that. I spend a lot of time working with the damn YAML files. It's not a one-off thing for me.

You're not the first person to say this to me, they say "you rarely touch the YAML!!!", but then I look at their last six PRs, and each one had at least a small change to the YAML setup. I don't think you or they are lying, I think people forget how often you actually have to futz with it.

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

#367

Post by shlomo_z »

mitjam wrote: post #249
shlomo_z wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of this. Can you share a link of what you are referring to? I care about this.

Here you are: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/sena...

Wow. I guess self hosting is a good idea.

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

#368

Post by tombert »

kortilla wrote: post #212
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…

All of these anecdotes seem to come from people who don’t bother to try to learn kubernetes. > YAML files, and then spend a day fixing them by copy-pasting increasingly-convoluted things on stackexchange. This is terrible behavior. Its not any different from yanking out pam modules because you’re getting SSH auth failures caused by a bad permission on an SSH key. > If I get to tens of millions of users, maybe I’ll wo…

Sure, because Kubernetes is convoluted and not fun and is stupidly bureaucratic. I might learn to enjoy being kicked in the balls if I practiced enough but after the first time I don't think I'd like to continue.

> This is terrible behavior. Its not any different from yanking out pam modules because you’re getting SSH auth failures caused by a bad permission on an SSH key.

Sure, I agree, maybe they should make the entire process less awful then and easier to understand. If they're providing a framework to do distributed systems "correctly" then don't make it easy for someone whose heart really isn't into it to screw it up.

> K8s isn’t there for 10s of millions of users. It’s there so you’re not dependent on some bespoke VM state. It also allows you to do code review on infra changes like port numbers being exposed, etc.

That's true of basically any container stuff or orchestration stuff, but sure.

Kubernetes just screams to me as suffering from a "tool to make it look like I'm doing a lot of work". I have similar complaints with pretty much all Java before Java ~17 or so.

I'm not convinced that something like k8s has to be as complicated as it is.

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

#369

Post by pdimitar »

jiggawatts wrote: post #223
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…

Speaking of Kubernetes performance: I had a need for fast scale-out for a bulk testing exercise. The gist of it was that I had to run Selenium tests with six different browsers against something like 13,000 sites in a hurry for a state government. I tried Kubernetes, because there's a distributed Selenium runner for it that can spin up different browsers in individual pods, even running Windows and Linux at the same…

> I gave up and simply provisioned a 120 vCPU / 600 GB memory cloud server with spot pricing for $2/hour and ran everything locally with scripts. I ended up scanning a decent chunk of my country's internet in 15 minutes.

Now that is a blog post that I would read with interest, top to bottom.

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

#370

Post by tombert »

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…

If I had set up the infrastructure myself I'd probably have a different opinion on all of this stuff, but I came into this job where everything was set up for me. I don't know if it was don't "incorrectly", and I do fear that stating as such might get into territory adjacent to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.

I mostly just think that k8s integration with GCP is a huge pain in the ass, every time I have to touch it it's the worst part of me day.

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