The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes

Cloudfoundry is better in terms of governance and project’s direction. Many of the main developers work full time at Pivtoal. But it is hard to run your own CF without significant investment like access management and “painless” upgrade (etcd is a pain in the entire CF stack in my experience). Though I have to admit the project is moving in the right direction in the past year or so.

It does. I've deployed and maintained our company's infrastructure on Kubernetes for over a year now.

> K8s came as a savior to all my issues: I burned all my old ansible scripts and rewrote all my infrastructure in k8s.

This doesn't make any sense.

Ansible scripts out changes to make to a system. Kubernetes deals only with opaque images and does not change them at all, it simply runs them.

>K8s is far from being just a trendy buzzwordy shiny new cool toy to play with. It solves real world problems that dev ops have. I am so glad this technology exists and I hope to never have to go back to writing ansible/puppet/whatever scripts.

I'm not really sure how to reply to this without being accused of bad faith, but I'll just reiterate again, your post does not make sense because it is talking about tools that do different things. It's like saying you love hammers and hope to never use wrenches again.

That said, Kubernetes is a shiny buzzword that is much overvalued.

Just yesterday I had someone tell me "Kubernetes was like magic and it made everything easy". This is absolutely not the thing a serious/honest Kubernetes user would say. Kubernetes is a big heavy thing, and it's a lot of trouble to maintain it; generally, far more trouble than using sane configuration management on VMs would be (you need sane configuration management in k8s too, so you aren't swapping one complexity for another). We're reaching "MongoDB is web scale" levels of hysteria around Kubernetes.

Example of the insanity: my account on HN has been censured for the "tedious" nature in which I would assert that Kubernetes is not a good platform for databases.

There is a serious, concerted effort by Google to put k8s at the forefront, and they are not playing games with it.

I saw another comment that did this just a minute ago. Is k8s-hysteria getting so out of control that it's consuming Docker whole? Seems like it may be.

----- EDITING IN RESPONSE TO GOUGGOUG -----

HN's limitation on my post rate has kicked in. Response to gouggoug follows this note, since I'm not allowed to post it.

This rate limit was originally installed to make me stop speaking against the kool-aid Kubernetes hivemind and now it's filling its purpose quite well. See this thread for the original infraction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 . After the fact, dang has justified the rate limit by saying I was engaging in a flame war. Read the offending thread and judge for yourselves.

Remember, YC doesn't want you to ask if you need Kubernetes or not. They just want you to use it. If someone on HN says otherwise too frequently, they'll rate limit that person's account, as they've done to mine.

Doesn't matter if you have 10 years of history on the site. Doesn't matter if you have 10k+ karma. Only matters that you're counteracting the narrative that Google is paying a lot of money to push.

No matter how frilly and new-age someone makes themselves out to be, people only have so much tolerance for argument when there's money, power, and prestige on the line. HN is no exception. There's an inverse correlation between the credibility of counter-arguments and the urgency of the situation; crazy stuff won't get much retaliatory fire because most people can tell it's crazy, but non-crazy stuff that counteracts their goals will be pushed down, because most people can tell it's not crazy.

----- BEGIN RESPONSE TO GOUGGOUG -----

He says that he wants Kubernetes to replace a local Vagrant image. Kubernetes doesn't replace Vagrant. To replace Vagrant, he would want Docker, rkt, etc., not Kubernetes. Kubernetes solves a different problem. Yet he says that he wants to try Kubernetes to fix the problem that Kubernetes doesn't fix.

k8s and Vagrant address wholly separate concerns (where to run things rather than how to run things). The poster I replied to is conflating Kubernetes and Docker, the underlying containers that do the actual execution.

> Maybe some less advanced users using k8s don't realize that it heavily uses docker (or rkt, or whatever container runtime you could think of), but how is that an issue?

How is it not an issue? Is it OK for developers to not know the difference between a compiler and an IDE now? A web server and a browser? A computer case and a CPU? A network card and a modem? These things are not mere details, even if they are often used together. Technical professionals who can't differentiate between these aren't just "less advanced users", they're posers.

k8s is a huge chunk of crap to throw in between you and your applications. One should, at the very least, have an accurate high-level idea of what it does before they go around telling everyone that they need it.

This is a big test for the development community, and I don't know how it resolves. Are discerning coders who've seen this fad cycle before just going to have hold their noses and pretend to be gung-ho about the latest fad, or do they stick to their principles and say "Yeah, I'd use that if we had a good reason, but I just don't know many..."?

Bear in mind, doing the latter just means some idiot who's read six lines of a blog post from TechCrunch is going to come in there repeating "blockchain" and "Kubernetes" non-stop until they get hired on the spot.

We have a lot of people who've been misled into believing "copy Google and magical fairy unicorns will fly out of your butt" crawling all over this community, including a lot of under-experienced developers themselves who apparently don't realize that they're reaching outside of their comfort zone with this.

It's very hard to find a company that isn't trying to get Kubernetes-ified as fast as they can. If you go into an interview and say that you're so-so on Kubernetes, it'd be like saying you don't like Node in 2014 or that you don't like Mongo in 2012 -- you're out the door. Every company needs to be like the cool kids and get the magic of the Great Googly Kubernetes smeared on themselves.

This is of course very silly and bad from a technical standpoint, but it seems to primarily be about social standing. That's why something like EKS is so good. They just fork over some cash to Amazon and then they can tell everyone that they too use Kubernetes, and all of Google's hard-fought marketing effort goes down the tubes, since users are still glued to Amazon's platform.