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I am building a cloud

crawshaw.io

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Re: I am building a cloud

#411

Post by adamors »

rbren wrote: post #399

Lots of negativity towards k8s in here. It's always funny to me when $WILDLY_POPULAR_TECH gets ripped apart like this, as though no one has ever had a positive experience with it. I've seen similar pile-ons for React, microservices, git, PHP, JavaScript, cloud services, really anything that's been adopted at scale.

HN has had a hate boner for K8s for as long as I can remember.

In my experience, K8s is a million times better than legacy shit it is usually replacing. The Herokus, the Ansible soup, the Chef/Puppet soup before that etc. The legacy infra that was held together by glue and sweat that everybody was afraid to touch.

Re: I am building a cloud

#412

Post by Hasz »

yard2010 wrote: post #96
dajonker wrote: post #74

> Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig. So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined netw…

I don't get it, I think that k8s is the best software written since win95. It redefines computing in the same way IMHO. I have some experience in working with k8s on prod and I loved every moment of it. I'm definitely missing something.

Took a while to find this. K8s is great, IMO most of the people with alternative setups are just rebuilding (usually worse) or compressing (specific to their use case) k8s features that have been GA for a long time.

Spend some time learning it, using it to deploy simple apps, and you won't go back to deploying in a VM again imo.

This only gets better with ai-assisted development, any model is going to produce much better results for k8s given the huge training set vs someone's bespoke build rube-goldberg machine.

Re: I am building a cloud

#413

Post by jeffbee »

p_l wrote: post #340
radlad wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complaints I see about Kubernetes are typically more about one of two things: (a) this looks complex to learn, and I don't have a need for it - existing deployment patterns solve my use case, or (b) Kubernetes is much less inefficient than running software on bare-metal (energy or cost.) Usually they go hand in hand.

The funniest thing is that kubernetes was designed for bare metal running, not cloud...

Yeah if someone says that k8s is costing them energy they are either using it very, very incorrectly, or they just don't know what they are talking about.

Re: I am building a cloud

#414

Post by tayo42 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #371
adamtulinius wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you spin up Kubernetes for "a couple of containers to run your web app", I think you're doing something wrong in the first place, also coupled with your comment about adding SDN to Kubernetes. People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.

Even if using just one VM, I'll probably slap k3s on it and manage my application using manifests. It's just so much easier than dealing with puppet or chef or vanilla cloud-init. Docker compose works too, but at that point it's just easier to stick with k3s and then I can have nice things like background jobs, a straightforward path to HA, access to an ecosystem of existing software, and a nicer CLI.

Thats what I don't get when people bring up this idea k8s is complicated.

All of those other tools are complicated and fragile

Re: I am building a cloud

#415

Post by simonebrunozzi »

dajonker wrote: post #74

> Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig. So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined netw…

> nuking the cluster, booted up a single VM with debian, enabled the firewall and used Kamal to deploy the app with docker.

Absolutely brilliant. Love it.

Re: I am building a cloud

#416

Post by tayo42 »

imtringued wrote: post #312
BirAdam wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... if you're at the point where you're using a single VM, I have to ask why bother with docker at all? You're paying a context switch overhead, memory overhead, and disk overhead that you do not need to. Just make an image of the VM in case you need to drop it behind an LB.

If you've ever had the displeasure of seeing the sorry state of VM tooling you would have known that building custom VM images is a very complicated endeavour compared to podman build or docker build. I once tried to build a simple setup using VM images and the complexity exploded to the point where I'm not sure why anyone should bother. When building a container you can just throw everything into it and keep the mes…

This comment chain is probably talking about like aws images, amis, which is just an api call and it snapshots the vm for you. Or use packer

Re: I am building a cloud

#417

Post by stego-tech »

I'm excited to see what they put together, because this raises a number of similar gripes I have with public cloud in its current state:

* Insistence on adding costly abstractions to overcome the limitations of non-fungible resources

* Deliberate creation of over or under-sized resource "pieces" instead of letting folks consume what they need

* Deliberate incompatibility with other vendors to enforce lock-in

I pitched a "Universal Cloud" abstraction layer years ago that never got any traction, and honestly this sounds like a much better solution anyhow. When modern virtualization is baked into OS kernels, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to enforce arbitrary resource sizes or limits other than to inflate consumption.

Kubernetes without all the stuff that makes it a bugbear to administrate, in other words. Let me buy/rent a pool of stuff and use it how I see fit, be it containers or VMs or what-have-you.

Re: I am building a cloud

#418

Post by stackskipton »

adamors wrote: post #411
rbren wrote: post #399

Lots of negativity towards k8s in here. It's always funny to me when $WILDLY_POPULAR_TECH gets ripped apart like this, as though no one has ever had a positive experience with it. I've seen similar pile-ons for React, microservices, git, PHP, JavaScript, cloud services, really anything that's been adopted at scale.

HN has had a hate boner for K8s for as long as I can remember. In my experience, K8s is a million times better than legacy shit it is usually replacing. The Herokus, the Ansible soup, the Chef/Puppet soup before that etc. The legacy infra that was held together by glue and sweat that everybody was afraid to touch.

As SRE, totally agree. Most companies I've been at where we implement K8S, which is around 30-50 VMs, ends up building their own, shittier Kubernetes. This blog post: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern... is a favorite of mine.

Re: I am building a cloud

#419

Post by ipsento606 »

Hasz wrote: post #412
yard2010 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it, I think that k8s is the best software written since win95. It redefines computing in the same way IMHO. I have some experience in working with k8s on prod and I loved every moment of it. I'm definitely missing something.

Took a while to find this. K8s is great, IMO most of the people with alternative setups are just rebuilding (usually worse) or compressing (specific to their use case) k8s features that have been GA for a long time. Spend some time learning it, using it to deploy simple apps, and you won't go back to deploying in a VM again imo. This only gets better with ai-assisted development, any model is going to produce much be…

I deploy prod by running a shell script I wrote that rsyncs the latest version of the codebase to my server, then sshs into the server and restarts the relevant services

how could k8s improve my deployment process?

Re: I am building a cloud

#420

Post by moooo99 »

adamtulinius wrote: post #89
dajonker wrote: post #74

> Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig. So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined netw…

If you spin up Kubernetes for "a couple of containers to run your web app", I think you're doing something wrong in the first place, also coupled with your comment about adding SDN to Kubernetes. People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.

> People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.

This is a problem I've run into enterprise deployments. K8s is often the lowest common denominator semi small platform engineering teams arrive on. At my current employer, a platform managed K8s namespace is the only thing we got in terms of PaaS offering, so it is what we use. Is it overpowered? Yes. Is it overly complex for our usecase? Definitely. Could we basically get by hosting our services on a few cheap mini computers with no performance penalty? Also yes.

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