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‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

zwischenzugs.com

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Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#101

Post by nameless912 »

poxrud wrote: post #97

The strength of AWS does not come from any individual offering, but from the way the many services effortlessly tie together. Job queues, email/sms services, databases, all available under the same api. Sure I could install my own open source versions of these but I'd rather spend time writing code than worrying about security patches and updates. For me the biggest game changer was realizing the true power of lambda…

> effortlessly

Uh...have you ever actually used AWS? There's friction all over. It's certainly not a seamless experience going from API to API.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#102

Post by dankohn1 »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #45
jpgvm wrote: post #39

In my experience AWS is the huge waste of time. I spent years on and off effectively building poor implementations of k8s to make AWS digestible to developers. If you work in "IT" rather than infrastructure for a large software company you might not have experienced this as internal IT is more static and easy to run on AWS/VMWare/whatever. For me k8s finally signals moving beyond that problem and onto more interestin…

I've hardly looked at k8s, it looked like a pain to get a docker-compose file running in it the last time I looked. I think there was a tool to translate it to something kubernetes could deal with. That said, after the last four months I've had of trying to get Route53, API Gateway, Lambdas, ECS, VPCs, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, etc, etc running in CloudFormation I really can't imagine it's worse under any sl…

Yes, you're thinking of https://github.com/kubernetes/kompose

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#103

Post by rmdashrfstar »

nameless912 wrote: post #101
poxrud wrote: post #97

The strength of AWS does not come from any individual offering, but from the way the many services effortlessly tie together. Job queues, email/sms services, databases, all available under the same api. Sure I could install my own open source versions of these but I'd rather spend time writing code than worrying about security patches and updates. For me the biggest game changer was realizing the true power of lambda…

> effortlessly Uh...have you ever actually used AWS? There's friction all over. It's certainly not a seamless experience going from API to API.

Your comment is unproductive and unnecessarily sarcastic. It would seem obvious the parent has used the services provided by AWS, and your focusing entirely on the perceived negatives and friction when combining services is not constructive.

Are you suggesting there is less friction in using multiple softwares, likely as self hosted, produced by separate developers, compared to using services hosted by AWS which allow you to only worry about building your product and managing links between services? The latter almost undeniably leads to greater productivity over the former, and if you're interested more about building and delivering a software product, that must be preferable.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#104

Post by whoisjuan »

zwischenzug wrote: post #7
whoisjuan wrote: post #2

I disagree. The only reason for AWS slow adoption of Kubernetes was because they couldn't find a strong use-case within their customer base. Customers knew they wanted to use it, but they really didn't know how or why it would be better than using other type of container architecture. AWS doesn't build services for customers to toy around. Every new service is a significant investment so the data and the use cases ne…

Author here. This is absolutely not true. I worked for an AWS customer that wanted to use it and had a crystal clear strategy for why. The idea that AWS didn't have a business case for EKS is _laughable_. Also laughable is the idea that K8s didn't have enough traction to be worth the investment. EKS was a bolt from the blue - we'd been quietly told by senior staff that ECS would be moved to a K8s API (which we may ha…

Why would you think that a particular AWS customer anecdote (at your 1 to 1 scale) asking for K8s is validation for building a managed K8s service at the enormous AWS scale?

I think you didn't understand my argument. I'm not saying people didn't have use cases. They likely did. But nothing at an enterprise level. Nothing at the moment could hint someone paying multi-million dollar contracts contigent to having a K8s managed service.

A single customer asking for K8s doesn't prove anything in the larger picture. A larger picture where you have to invest millions of dollars if you move into that particular space.

Also, please pardon my delicacy here, but what's the need for using the word "laughable"? I don't understand what's laughable about my position. I really don't get why people think that the best way to prove their point is to undermine a challenging opinion with pejorative adjectives.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#105

Post by alexandre_m »

solatic wrote: post #70
sklarsa wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use helm? I'm looking into spinning up (and eventually productionizing) a k8s cluster at my job and I was leaning towards using helm since some pieces that I was thinking about using are installed via helm charts ( https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx for example)

If you use third-party Helm charts, you eventually need to add onto the generated objects in a way which the chart doesn't support, and then you're up a creek without a paddle. This is precisely the use case which Kustomize tries to fix and it was the only real strength which Helm had to begin with (i.e. the ease of installing third-party software on your cluster). In the meantime, because you must install Helm into…

Something not pretty, but that works well for me, is using yarn to manage dependencies on upstream Helm chart repositories, then use kustomize to override certain things if required.

That checkouts a local copy locked at a specific version, which you can bump easily, and allows overriding the template definitions on your side.

No need for additional infrastructure.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#106

Post by alexandre_m »

navd wrote: post #88
solatic wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use third-party Helm charts, you eventually need to add onto the generated objects in a way which the chart doesn't support, and then you're up a creek without a paddle. This is precisely the use case which Kustomize tries to fix and it was the only real strength which Helm had to begin with (i.e. the ease of installing third-party software on your cluster). In the meantime, because you must install Helm into…

I thought it would be useful to add that you can also generate k8s manifests from a helm chart using the `helm template` command. I'm in the same boat where I avoid helm if at all possible.

That only works for local checked out copy and not remote repo URL, unfortunately.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#107

Post by pbalau »

marcinzm wrote: post #95
philliphaydon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone keeps talking about vendor lock-in. In regards to RDS you can still export your database and move somewhere else. But we use it because we don’t want to manage the database, we don’t want to worry about availability zones and syncing the data and failing over for updates. I don’t want to setup k8s instead and configure it and maintain it. That stuff is boring for me.

The vendor lock is is not the data in RDS, it's the ops code that sets up and integrates RDS with everything else you do. K8S allows you to use the same code to setup a database, or most anything else, in any cloud host.

My only ops code is a thin wrapper over the secrets manager API, that converts from a secret to something Django orm or sqlalchemy can use to connect.

My pain point is db migrations, from version X to version Y. My bad to pick Django for our internal tooling web app and go with its orm. Fairly confident that I can change that to sqlalchemy easy, if I get the time for it.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#108

Post by repolfx »

jpatokal wrote: post #5
whoisjuan wrote: post #2

I disagree. The only reason for AWS slow adoption of Kubernetes was because they couldn't find a strong use-case within their customer base. Customers knew they wanted to use it, but they really didn't know how or why it would be better than using other type of container architecture. AWS doesn't build services for customers to toy around. Every new service is a significant investment so the data and the use cases ne…

This sounds... implausible, given that every metric I've seen for k8s is pretty much hockey-sticking. For example, it's the 2nd largest open source project ever (after Linux) by contributors & commits. The OP's hypothesis is that Amazon would much prefer ACS to succeed, because it exists already and provides nice lock-in, and AKS was only launched (after considerable internal shitfights, I'd imagine!) once it became…

Linux isn't the largest open source project ever! Look at Android - it incorporates Linux and then adds vastly more on top.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#109

Post by repolfx »

paulftw wrote: post #40

Software Engineer's fallacy: if all you have is software/programming skills you start to look for an open source linux based solution to holding wooden boards in place, one that doesn't vendor lock you into the iron ore. With Windows vs Linux the premise was you install absolutely free software on a computer you already own and you end up with a superior computing and programming environment. With k8s - you switched…

But many companies and workloads don't "go viral" because they aren't VC funded social networks. They're big, stable companies in mature markets where competition means everyone is always looking for cost savings.

If your workloads are predictable and you care about cost savings, AWS/Azure/GCP aren't great deals. They're expensive; why do you think these firms love them so much. AWS made Amazon profitable for the first time ever. These are the new big platform plays but many firms don't need them. Modern hardware is reliable and if you don't need thousands of machines or really complex proprietary services (AI accelerators etc) the overhead of renting a bunch of dedicated machines in a cheap provider isn't that high.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#110

Post by CyanLite4 »

navd wrote: post #89
CyanLite4 wrote: post #83

AWS will be around in 5 years. It has an established business model making billions of dollars per year. K8s won’t be around in 5 years. It’s peaking towards the top of the hype cycle. If you’re wondering about cloud lock-in, then you don’t get the power of the cloud.

I disagree, I think k8s is entering the slope of enlightenment. The ecosystem is still early, but there are some amazing tools being built that can make you very productive.

And that in itself is the reason why k8s is hype. Too many tools, too much of an “ecosystem”. Too complex. Linux suffers from these issues as well.
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