I like to say (lovingly) that Kubernetes takes complex things and simplifies them in complex ways.
It just hides the complexity in some yml files instead of in a deploy script or a sysadmin's head.
Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#12It's not because of the networking stack.
I've yet to meet anyone who can easily explain how the CNI, services, ingresses and pod network spaces all work together.
Everything is so interlinked and complicated that you need to understand vast swathes of kubernetes before you can attach any sort of complexity to the networking side.
I contrast that to it's scheduling and resourcing components which are relatively easy to explain and obvious.
Even storage is starting to move to overcomplication with CSI.
I half jokingly think K8s adoption is driven by consultants and cloud providers hoping to ensure a lock-in with the mechanics of actually deploying workloads on K8s.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#13For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…
> I can and have repointed my entire infrastructure with minimal fuss.
When you get to that blog post please consider going in depth on this. Would love to see actual battletested information vs. the usual handwavy "it works everywhere".
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#14In a side note if you were to invest your time in writing operators, would you use kubebuilder or operator-sdk?
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#15For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…
> I can and have repointed my entire infrastructure with minimal fuss. When you get to that blog post please consider going in depth on this. Would love to see actual battletested information vs. the usual handwavy "it works everywhere".
I sure will. 99% of the work was ingress handling and SSL cert generation. Everything else was fairly seamless.
Even ingress is trivial if you use a cloud balancer per ingress. But I wanted to save money so use a single cloud balancer for multiple ingresses. So you need something like ingress-nginx, which has a few vendor-specific subtleties.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#16It makes a bit more sense if you see Kubernetes as the new Linux: a common foundation that the industry agrees on, and that you can build other abstractions on top of. In particular Kubernetes is the Linux Kernel, while we are in the early days of discovering what the "Linux distro" equivalent is, which will make it much more friendly / usable to a wider audience
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#17For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…
Have you tried or considered Nomad (from the makers of Terraform)?
I haven't, and since I've sunk the cost into Kubernetes and know it very well now, likely won't end up there.
In retrospect though, maybe it's exactly what I needed. Great suggestion.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#18For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…
Out of curiosity, are you using terraform to deploy k8s, your app stack on k8s, or both?
To follow this - what do you feel K8S provides on top of terraform?
We used K8S on a large project and I felt like it really, really wasn't necessary.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#19For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…
I've just started to look into it, but it seems like the project has been focusing on improving the onboarding experience since it has a reputation for being a huge pain to set up. Do you think it has gotten easier lately?
No. Not easier in my opinion. And some of the fires you only learn after getting burnt badly. [1]
Note: my experience was all with cloud-provided Kubernetes, never running my own. So it was already an order of magnitude easier. Can't even imagine rolling my own. [2]
[1] My personal favorite. Truly egregious, despite how amazing k8s is. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/63371#issuec...
[2] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#20For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…
Out of curiosity, are you using terraform to deploy k8s, your app stack on k8s, or both?
So terraform is a higher-order, meta-Kubernetes. It's very rarely used, but who provisions the cluster itself? That's terraform.
So terraform creates the cluster, DNS and VPC. Then k8s runs pretty much everything.