Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

oneuptime.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 92 posts

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#51

Post by bakies »

bob1029 wrote: post #45
JoshTriplett wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I've described this for years: Kubernetes makes managing 1000 servers as easy as managing 20 servers, and makes managing 3 servers as easy as managing 20 servers.

Most products barely need 1 server.

And if you ever outgrow that it's going to be a huge pain. Or a hardware failure. If you start on Kubernetes early you'll be able to add more servers for capacity very easily. Not to mention out of the box you get failover and HA. And you can deploy managed services and have database deployments, or object stores, etc.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#52

Post by tajd »

I feel like articles like this need to come with a diagram like this to put it in the context of relevant tradeoffs.

                       High Scale/Revenue
                              │
                              │
      Managed Services        │      Self-hosted K8s
      (Overpaying but         │       (article is
      no choice)              │       pitched here)
                              │
  ────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────
      Low capacity            │         High capacity
                              │
                              │
      Managed Services        │      Managed Services
      (Right choice -         │      (Wasting money on
      focus on product)       │       platform team)
                              │
                        Low Scale/Revenue
Or something like that. Maybe as a function of time as well but that might be harder to do in 2d.

Sure I can absolutely manage my own k8s, but there is no doubt it's easier for me to spin up postgres and ship faster on my own. At enterprise scale it's definitely a lot easier to do everything in k8s and be able to manage as many aspects as possible. I have experience of both.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#53

Post by devsda »

ForHackernews wrote: post #21

Can't wait for k8s hype to go the way of microservices.

One perpetuates the other. If you have k8s, you are tempted to use microservice architecture and if you have microservices then k8s makes them look manageable.

I suspect both of them will go down together if/when they do.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#54

Post by stackskipton »

Counter Argument to "HA HA, Kubernetes sucks": https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern...

Kubernetes is a rat nest and I long hope for Kubernetes be simpler (Who needs this Gateway API?) but Devs keep building crazy and crazy solutions so we have to pivot to keep up.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#55

Post by senderista »

ecshafer wrote: post #36
bushbaba wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company is on prem, spending north of 1 billion per year. Cloud is actually cheaper when considering total cost of ownership. Thats salaries, opex, capex costs. Worse, our speed to delivery is generally worse. Because on prem is inelastic, we are at sub 10% peak utilization of compute resources. If we added in the likely higher cloud utilization rate we are talking of 30%+ savings from on prem.

Peak Utilization is a tough one for on prem and is a decent argument for cloud. I was at a company that was also at <10% peak utilization most of the time. It was finance, so it was mostly doing nothing, except for the couple days a year where we shot up 10000x, so we had to build for that case. So yeah losing the data centers, and cloud was a cost savings.

So the "obvious" (but complex!) solution is a "hybrid cloud": use on-prem for the predictable, constant "DC component" of your demand, and use cloud for cyclical or unpredictable demand changes. That will keep peak demand decoupled from permanently provisioned capacity while saving on always-utilized capacity. Easier said than done, of course.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#56

Post by stackskipton »

bakies wrote: post #27
bushbaba wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company is on prem, spending north of 1 billion per year. Cloud is actually cheaper when considering total cost of ownership. Thats salaries, opex, capex costs. Worse, our speed to delivery is generally worse. Because on prem is inelastic, we are at sub 10% peak utilization of compute resources. If we added in the likely higher cloud utilization rate we are talking of 30%+ savings from on prem.

> we are at sub 10% peak utilization of compute resources so... you bought way too much hardware?

That's not unusual. First off, sometimes 1000 extra dollars will get you a ton more compute you need so why not and second, on prem tends to be extremely inelastic so you buy a ton of compute because you never know when compute requirements change.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#57

Post by bakies »

pat2man wrote: post #42

As someone who self hosted bare metal Kubernetes on my own rack, it's a lot of work to get it set up. We used RedHat Openshift which has a pretty good solution out of the box, but the learning curve was relatively high. That being said, once it was set up, there was not a lot of maintenance. Kubernetes is quire resilient when set up properly, and the cost savings were significant.

Try talos next time. It took minutes to setup. Red Hat docs and product names scare me since they are intentionally obtuse. I thought I wanted openshift but no way i'm paying and i couldn't figure out how to even get started. Talos was such a breeze.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#58

Post by nazgulsenpai »

nimbius wrote: post #10

Kubernetes is powerful, yes. it is also a feckless rats nest of bolt-ons and ride-alongs. its sharepoint levels of byzantine tuning so complex that, like sharepoint, it comes with its own bespoke administrators that often have little or no knowledge of basic networking or operating systems --only kubernetes--. - Upgrading a kubernetes cluster may as well be an olympic sport. its so draconian most best practice docume…

I preface this with saying that my experience is all low/medium traffic and single cluster, and I've never had to develop for Kubernetes. But as a sysadmin, I don't mind it at all. I started a new job learned through being given logins to for AWS EKS mobile/web application backend and an on-prem OpenShift for an internal application. The the whole thing mostly works logically once you understand the underlying concepts, and the documentation is pretty good. The only issues I ever had that required external assistance were platform specific quirks (like EKS ALB annotations most recently). Even moved several of our single server workloads over.

Re: Kubernetes Is Your Private Cloud

#59

Post by btown »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #40
nostrebored wrote: post #4

“Everything You Expect from a Cloud, Running on Your Terms“* Except you own ops, management, extension, interoperability, access, security, scalability, redundancy… words cannot express how ridiculous all of the koober propaganda is

The way I've described this for years: Kubernetes makes managing 1000 servers as easy as managing 20 servers, and makes managing 3 servers as easy as managing 20 servers.

My way of thinking about it is this: you have your own hyper-flexible Heroku, but (monkey's paw curls) you can only interact with it by typing large amounts of YAML.

Oh, and all the documentation for that YAML assumes you've memorized as much vocabulary as a Foreign Language 101 class.

(And there is a mad god that says: if you try to use click-ops to get around this without knowing the vocabulary, you're going to have a bad time.)

But on the other hand: to put it in terms of the "3 servers" - the moment you think you'll have 3 servers, and any level of uptime expectations, you'll inevitably have to rebuild them, services and logging and all, from scratch often and quickly enough that you might as well have 20 servers with how stressful that rebuild will be.

k8s can be a saving grace there, and I recommend it to anyone with the time and interest in how cluster best practices work! But it's not a free option or a weekend skill-up.

Post reply on HN