Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks • Hacker News Board

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#101

Post by HelloNurse » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

geggam wrote: post #84

solatic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using it for anything less than dozens of machines is overkill The question isn't really whether you need dozens of machines, it's whether you can foresee eventually maybe needing dozens of machines. Remember the bad old days when people said that relational databases were worthless because they "don't scale", that using Mongo and other NoSQL databases were practically a necessity for doing anything modern and "web…

The question isn't really whether you need dozens of machines, it's whether you can foresee eventually maybe needing dozens of machines. Kubernetes doesnt manage the machines. It manages the applications on machines that are managed with something else. You have to do something else to manage the machines

You could say that Kubernetes "manages the machines" from the point of view of the application, by providing a suitable environment to execute in (including actually starting the application)

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#102

Post by justinsaccount » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:27 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #96

justinsaccount wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first one is a complete configuration you could kubectl apply into a cluster that sends traffic to a backend service that may be running across multiple instances on multiple machines. The second is a configuration fragment that is useless by itself that would send all traffic to a single instance running on localhost.

You can just drop it in a conf.d folder created by the package install and it would work just fine. Also we're talking simple projects, and simple projects are typically not distributed; typically don't need to be distributed. That said, supporting multiple backends with different load balancing algorithms is also pretty simple to write as well.

Ok, great... I have a bunch of simple projects like that, one web instance running on a single host.

How do I safely upgrade it without downtime? Ensuring that the new version starts up properly and can receive traffic before sending it requests and stopping the old one?

With k8s: kubectl set image deployment/my-deployment mycontainer=myimage:1.9.1 (or just use kubectl apply -f)

With your nginx config: ????

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#103

Post by Annatar » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:27 PM UTC

yebyen wrote: post #73

Annatar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Citation needed." https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Managing+Images https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/How+to+create+a+Virtual... https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Managing+NICs https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/Using+the+Service+Manag... ...and that's just a small, tiny sampling of what can be done, most of it doable across datacenters with Triton. With SmartOS, one virtualizes datacenters. "seriously wh…

So, am I understanding correctly that this is a virtualization solution? Isn't that not the same thing at all? Virtualization has a lot of overhead, and that would be my first concern, so can you address that? (My platform team balked at me when I suggested OpenShift, because they had it confused/thought I was talking about OpenStack, and they didn't want to incur the overhead of a virtualization layer. It wasn't unt…

" A virtualization solution is not a containers solution. Wait. Wait wait... I'm wrong, aren't I? From a quick google, it looks like Solaris Zones are almost exactly like containers in this way."

Yes, and they are true containers: fully functional UNIX servers, running at the speed of bare metal, because the OS is virtualized and not the hardware. I was running zones back in 2006 when project Kevlar first came out. Few months later we were running eight 4GB Oracle database instances in a single T2000 server, each database inside of one zone... GNU/Linux didn't even know what a container was yet, and wouldn't for several years...

Yes there's an IRC channel. Don't remember what it is. I've never needed to go there. I pop up on the SmartOS mailing list every few years to ask not a technical, but an architectural question. That's about it.

"Maybe you are all consummate professionals and just use mailing lists, but I am skeptical of that."

A lot of us are professional system and/or kernel engineers or architects, yes. Many of us are freelancers and consultants. Most of us are true engineers, with university degrees in engineering. But there are a lot of newcomers too, especially from ISP's, where SmartOS is a popular hosting solution for infrastructure and customers. The kind of stuff that has to work and has to be unbreakable because it's making money.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#104

Post by Annatar » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:32 PM UTC

justinsaccount wrote: post #98

yebyen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the same thing I do with SmartOS in a far more complex way Citation needed. Yes, Kubernetes runs on Linux kernel and until someone ports it to use something other than iptables and the linux cgroups API, that will be true. But I could say the same thing about being locked into SVR4/OpenSolaris, and I bet you a Coke that a lot more people will agree with me. The Kubernetes slack community has over 48,000 members and…

Don't waste your time, he's a troll that pops up on every thread that has anything to do with things like docker or k8s. It doesn't matter what the problem is, smartos is the solution. SmartOS is solid technology, but he doesn't have the slightest clue what k8s does, but is completely certain that smartos somehow does "the same thing" better. They aren't even mutually exclusive, there's no reason you couldn't write a…

"Don't waste your time, he's a troll that pops up on every thread that has anything to do with things like docker or k8s."

Thank you for an off-topic opinion. Yes, I do "pop up" on every Kubernetes and Docker topic because both are nothing but hype and bullshit (this topic with "no thanks" is a rare exception, and I wholeheartedly agree with the author of it, even though I vehemently disagree with some of his methods). What the hell do I need an "orchestrator" like Kubernetes for if all my components are packaged and I have a software deployment server where I can mass deploy to all my systems at will? (Hint: I don't.) Kubernetes is a solution to a string of bad decisions, making the situation even worse.

And Kubernetes is nothing but a provisioning solution. If you think Kubernetes is an orchestrator, you've never seen one. Nolio is an orchestrator.

So what if Joyent has Kubernetes support? Joyent isn't infallible, just because they make SmartOS that doesn't make them right in everything. It's not like they can do no wrong. Let's refrain from fanboyism; being Joyent doesn't automatically make them right in everything they do.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#105

Post by caymanjim » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

Kubernetes is just one of many development ecosystem tools that solve real problems and, once you know them, make your life easier. The arguments in this article can apply to any development tool or practice.

Why separate your code into multiple files? Why write tests? Why use a code linter? Why use virtual environments? Why write a Makefile?

If you're working on a small personal project, or you're a newer developer learning the ropes, or the project is temporary, not important, doesn't need to scale, etc. then it's simply a matter of personal choice. It doesn't make sense to get bogged down learning a lot of tools and processes if there's no compelling business need and you're just trying to get the job done.

If you already know how to use these tools, though, they usually make your life a whole lot easier. I learn how to use complex systems in my career, where they're necessary and helpful. I apply these same tools and practices on my personal projects now, because once you know how to use something like Kubernetes, there's little cost to it and many of the benefits still apply.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#106

Post by wpietri » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #21

Oh man, the original article went way over the author's head. The point of the original article was that even though Kubernetes is primarily useful for tackling the challenges involved with running many workloads at enterprise scale, it can also be used to run small hobbyist workloads at a price point acceptable for hobbyist projects. Does that mean that Kubernetes should now be used for all hobbyist projects? No. If…

Personally, as somebody who is building a small Kubernetes cluster right now at home just for the fun of it: I think using Kubernetes for small projects is mostly a bad idea. So I appreciate the author warning people so they don't get misled by all the (justified) buzz around it.

For your average developer who just wants to get something running on a port, Kubernetes introduces two barriers: containerization and Kubernetes itself. These are non-trivial things to learn, especially if you don't have an ops background, and both of them add substantial debugging overhead. And again for that developer, they provide very, very small gains.

I think the calculus changes if that developer starts to run multiple services on multiple servers, wants to keep doing that for years, and needs high uptime. I have a bunch of personal services I run in VMs with Chef, and I'm excited to convert that over to Kubernetes, as it will make future OS upgrades and other maintenance easier. But my old setup ran for something like 6 years and it was just fine. For hobbyists whose hobbies don't include playing with cluster-scale ops tooling, I think it's perfectly fine to ignore Kubernetes. It's the new hotness, but it doesn't provide much value for them yet. They can wait a few years; by then the tooling will surely have improved for low-end installs.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#107

Post by cdelsolar » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:39 PM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #80

y4mi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i set up a kubernetes cluster 1 year ago at work and a private one last weekend. last year took, i think 2 days. my private one was up and running within ~1h, including writing the ansible role to first install binaries/dependencies and join the cluster as a worker node. either you didn't use kubeadm to set it up or ... i have no idea how you could've possibly failed. its pretty much (all) ${packagemanager} install d…

I didn't fail, I just couldn't see a strong ROI after doing a spike. I did use kubeadm. It required considerably more than just 3 simple steps required to get a basic working cluster up. Two days was more like it.

how does kubeadm take two days. I had to rebuild my cluster recently and it literally took me 20 minutes.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#108

Post by nebulous1 » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:41 PM UTC

solatic wrote: post #21

Oh man, the original article went way over the author's head. The point of the original article was that even though Kubernetes is primarily useful for tackling the challenges involved with running many workloads at enterprise scale, it can also be used to run small hobbyist workloads at a price point acceptable for hobbyist projects. Does that mean that Kubernetes should now be used for all hobbyist projects? No. If…

I don't see anywhere that you've explained how the original article "went way over the author's head", and your examples of suitable small project vs non-suitable aren't in the original article at all, you just decided all of that yourself.

The original article concludes with "It's my contention that Kubernetes also makes sense for small deployments and is both easy-to-use and inexpensive today". This article contends that it's not at all easy to use and price-wise he hasn't compared like-with-like.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#109

Post by falcolas » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

justinsaccount wrote: post #102

falcolas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just drop it in a conf.d folder created by the package install and it would work just fine. Also we're talking simple projects, and simple projects are typically not distributed; typically don't need to be distributed. That said, supporting multiple backends with different load balancing algorithms is also pretty simple to write as well.

Ok, great... I have a bunch of simple projects like that, one web instance running on a single host. How do I safely upgrade it without downtime? Ensuring that the new version starts up properly and can receive traffic before sending it requests and stopping the old one? With k8s: kubectl set image deployment/my-deployment mycontainer=myimage:1.9.1 (or just use kubectl apply -f) With your nginx config: ????

That moves the goalposts a bit. We've gone from a simple service to a fleet of highly available services on multiple hosts with zero downtime requirements.

At which point, sure, use Kubernetes.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#110

Post by justinsaccount » Thu, Oct 04, 2018, 3:45 PM UTC

Annatar wrote: post #104

justinsaccount wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't waste your time, he's a troll that pops up on every thread that has anything to do with things like docker or k8s. It doesn't matter what the problem is, smartos is the solution. SmartOS is solid technology, but he doesn't have the slightest clue what k8s does, but is completely certain that smartos somehow does "the same thing" better. They aren't even mutually exclusive, there's no reason you couldn't write a…

"Don't waste your time, he's a troll that pops up on every thread that has anything to do with things like docker or k8s." Thank you for an off-topic opinion. Yes, I do "pop up" on every Kubernetes and Docker topic because both are nothing but hype and bullshit (this topic with "no thanks" is a rare exception, and I wholeheartedly agree with the author of it, even though I vehemently disagree with some of his methods…

> he doesn't have the slightest clue what k8s does, but is completely certain that smartos somehow does "the same thing" better.

I stand by this statement. You don't have any idea what k8s does.

If you actually cared about convincing people that you don't need k8s and smartos is better, you'd write your own article describing in detail how you can easily use smartos for running personal projects on a 3 node cluster. Put up or shut up. YOU are nothing but hype.