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Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

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Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#11

Post by kozikow »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #6

The funny thing about Kubernetes is that I read somewhere that it's not actually widely used within Google (please correct me if I'm wrong). Given that's it's a complicated piece of software and that Google has extremely complicated requirements, that's pretty concerning. To me, we've barely starting to solve deployments, the idea of Kubernetes seems a little ahead of it's time. If you're using GPC I do hear it's rea…

If someone thinks kubernetes is complicated, they would cry during their first month with the borg.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#12

Post by ridruejo »

outside1234 wrote: post #3

> kubectl scaffold mysql --generate This exists, its called helm, which in fact delivers the productivity gains the author is looking for.

Correct, you can check out Kubeapps for a collection of apps packaged as Helm charts https://hub.kubeapps.com

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#13

Post by hyperrail »

outside1234 wrote: post #3

> kubectl scaffold mysql --generate This exists, its called helm, which in fact delivers the productivity gains the author is looking for.

In the following paragraph, the author considers and appears to reject that solution:

>Maybe the combination of operators and Helm charts covers this, but I don’t think that will cut it. Then we’re forcing developers to learn about two other things in addition to Kubernetes. Even if it’s just increasing the vocabulary and installing a new command line tool, it’s extra effort and thought. These things need to be first-class citizens and part of the Kubernetes out-of-the-box experience. They need to be accessible via kubectl.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#14

Post by chrisweekly »

nimish wrote: post #9

kubernetes is a classic case of a tool designed for consultants and companies to sell consulting services (Including cloud services, which is why every cloud provider leapt onto it). In like 90% of the cases when someone used Kubernetes, Docker Swarm would have easily sufficed.

Docker Swarm is a hot mess.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#15

Post by GiorgioG »

outside1234 wrote: post #3

> kubectl scaffold mysql --generate This exists, its called helm, which in fact delivers the productivity gains the author is looking for.

I have Kubernetes in Action on my desk and I haven’t cracked it open yet because Kubernetes seems monstrously complex. Sure helm gets you up and running. When something goes wrong in prod at 3am, what do you do?

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#16

Post by jrs95 »

The complexity of Kubernetes largely reflects the complexity of the problem. Nobody has delivered anything significantly simpler that hasn’t had a much smaller scope, and those tools approach the same level of complexity when composed with others to get the same level of functionality. But setting up Kubernetes is both well documented and automated on multiple cloud providers, whereas something like Nomad & Consul doesn’t really have a good end to end walk through to get you to the same destination as Kubernetes. I suppose if you’re fine with pushing that complexity into service clients you can avoid the need for a lot beyond what Nomad and Consul give you by themselves — but then you end up with the downsides that something like the Netflix microservices stack gets you. Fat clients ultimately leave the developer with more complexity, and Kubernetes helps you eliminate that in favor of more SRE/Ops/whatever-you’d-like-to-call-it complexity. Since cloud platforms can take a lot of the edge off of Ops complexity, that’s my preferred approach.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#17

Post by jhanschoo »

chrisweekly wrote: post #14
nimish wrote: post #9

kubernetes is a classic case of a tool designed for consultants and companies to sell consulting services (Including cloud services, which is why every cloud provider leapt onto it). In like 90% of the cases when someone used Kubernetes, Docker Swarm would have easily sufficed.

Docker Swarm is a hot mess.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but you need to substantiate your thesis with evidence.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#18

Post by lobster_johnson »

nimish wrote: post #9

kubernetes is a classic case of a tool designed for consultants and companies to sell consulting services (Including cloud services, which is why every cloud provider leapt onto it). In like 90% of the cases when someone used Kubernetes, Docker Swarm would have easily sufficed.

Disagree. OpenShift and CNCF are arguably exactly that, but Kubernetes itself isn't. It came out of the engineering team at Google, and its technical merit shouldn't be confused with the considerable marketing effort being put behind it.

Docker Swarm is much more deserving of this kind of cynicism -- a weak, badly designed solution forced on users by a company that's realizing their invention has been commoditized and is no longer a platform they control. Swarm was redesigned at one point to work more like Kubernetes because they realized it was a much saner model.

Kubernetes has more complexity, but it does scale down to single-node clusters.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#19

Post by atombender »

jrs95 wrote: post #16

The complexity of Kubernetes largely reflects the complexity of the problem. Nobody has delivered anything significantly simpler that hasn’t had a much smaller scope, and those tools approach the same level of complexity when composed with others to get the same level of functionality. But setting up Kubernetes is both well documented and automated on multiple cloud providers, whereas something like Nomad & Consul do…

I would also argue that Kubernetes is less complex than it seems at first glance.

Yes, if you look at all the possible parts, and at the current monolithic codebase, there's a lot of complexity. It also supports umpteen cloud providers, volume providers, networking stacks, etc., and comes with a whole swathe of bootstrapping tools for various environments (e.g. AWS).

But if you strip it down, Kubernetes is "simple": There's a consistent object store made out of JSON structures, and then there's a bunch of controllers listening to changes to that store to make stuff real. That is the core. Everything is, in principle, controllers mediating between the data model and the real world. Very elegant and orthogonal.

You also have an API, a scheduler, and a thing called Kubelet that runs on each node to manage containers and report node-specific metrics. And of course you have Docker, though with 1.10 you can more easily run dockerless via containerd, which is a great thing indeed.

The complexity comes from the operational part, when the pieces come together. And as you say, there's not really any way around it.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#20

Post by tbrock »

nicodjimenez wrote: post #6

The funny thing about Kubernetes is that I read somewhere that it's not actually widely used within Google (please correct me if I'm wrong). Given that's it's a complicated piece of software and that Google has extremely complicated requirements, that's pretty concerning. To me, we've barely starting to solve deployments, the idea of Kubernetes seems a little ahead of it's time. If you're using GPC I do hear it's rea…

This is the ultimate key feature of Kubernetes. It’s 1000x better than a hosted closed source solution because you can run it entirely locally.

It’s amazing that the hosted option 100% mirrors the self hosted option which mirrors dev.

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