Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#101

Post by gabrtv » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

jeethsuresh wrote: post #6

Dapr looks like Microsoft's answer to Istio - anecdotally, I've never gotten Istio to work (as recently as a few months ago) so I'll have to give this one a try at some point to see if they've done a better job. OAM though, perplexes me. Even the justification - that k8s is out of scope of the developer, and is handled by ops - speaks to a misunderstanding of some of the advantages clusters provide. Some research [1]…

> If Azure comes out with an implementation of OAM that uses their VSIs, I'll get interested.

Gabe from the Azure team.

VSIs? I'd love to understand this better.

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#102

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

gabrtv wrote: post #83

Lutger wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. This looks to me as if the audience is traditional enterprise who haven't yet adopted DevOps and to make kubernetes more accessible. But those are likely better served by either a PaaS or serverless solution. It doesn't inspire a great deal of confidence that the Azure CTO promotes this development model - if he isn't quoted out of context that is.

Gabe from the Azure team here. The goal of OAM is to promote better layering of the development and operations functions inside any org. This is modeled from what we’ve learned about high-functioning teams operating Kubernetes at scale, plus what we’ve learned running services inside Microsoft. The desire to have software engineers focus only on business logic is strong. This tends to result in the creation of an int…

Pivotal Labs in fact has an entire practice focusing on teaching and evolving the practice of "Platform as a Product". Operations is more than "just" operations, it's an engineering practice. You're delivering capabilities to a customer, looking for ways to make everyone's lives easier and better and faster.

I think that like folks at Azure, we evolved the approach based on experiences dogfooding various platforms, applying our existing thinking about product development and lots of learning from industry peers.

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#103

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #75

lnsp wrote: post #70

Somehow these enterprise people have turned Kubernetes, which basically was an advanced job scheduler for compute resources, into a unnecessary complex monster (just look at the LOC of kube-api). And that's still pretty decent compared to all the other projects in the ecosystem (looking at OpenShift, Istio ...). I really don't believe a lot of people have a valid use case for these projects like OAM when you look at…

Fundamentally, k8s isn’t a compute job scheduler—it’s an IaaS state converger, like Terraform, or AWS CloudFormation. As such, it needs to know how to model—and manipulate—the state of pretty much any IaaS resource you have. (And, unlike alternatives, it’s also extensible with custom convergible resource types, too.) That doesn’t mean that k8s itself is all that complex. It just needs a lot of libraries for all the s…

I think Kubernetes-the-scheduler and Kubernetes-the-patterns-with-reified-examples have diverged and are going to continue diverging.

The latter is more of a microkernel for distributed control systems.

My hunch is that this means OAM may be dead letter in the long run. Abstract from Kubernetes-as-scheduler, fine and good. But Kubernetes-as-microkernel is close to doing that already. Whatever my gripes about the details, the mechanisms and affordances are consistent and predictable. That's very valuable.

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#104

Post by mwjfussell » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:48 PM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #19

Dapr sounds like it could be cool. Almost like a cloud function but with more intelligence.

MarkF from the Azure team here. The idea is to provide a function like experience with any programming language and then have common capabilities like saving state, sending events that your app can use with local host calls. And make this all extensible with components

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#105

Post by mwjfussell » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:54 PM UTC

hardwaresofton wrote: post #5

Dapr looks like a slightly beefier sidecar-based service mesh.

MarkF from the Azure team. Dapr is not a service mesh, however it will work with service meshes such as itsio, linkerd etc. Dapr does provide direct service-to-service invocation which you can use in place of a service mesh if you want, however Dapr does not handle network policies or traffic management that service meshes do. Dapr is a side-car that is language agnostic, and using http or gRPC provides distributed system building blocks via open APIs for asynchronous pub-sub, stateful services, service discovery and invocation, actors and distributed tracing. All of this is extensible, so you can add new building block capabilities and only choose the use the ones you care about.

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#106

Post by vturecek » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 4:56 PM UTC

jeethsuresh wrote: post #6

Dapr looks like Microsoft's answer to Istio - anecdotally, I've never gotten Istio to work (as recently as a few months ago) so I'll have to give this one a try at some point to see if they've done a better job. OAM though, perplexes me. Even the justification - that k8s is out of scope of the developer, and is handled by ops - speaks to a misunderstanding of some of the advantages clusters provide. Some research [1]…

The overarching idea with OAM is to standardize the model by which applications are composed and operated, regardless of the environment you end up working in. So as you go from one platform to another, you have a consistent experience and a transferable process. We fully expect the implementing platform capabilities to differ, and the model is designed around this assumption. I think some standardization here is valuable.

At the same time, we aim to improve application modeling on systems like Kubernetes that currently focus more on container infrastructure.

disclosure: I'm one of the spec authors.

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#107

Post by mwjfussell » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

yodon wrote: post #60

How does Dapr (or the Actors in Dapr) relate to Microsoft Orleans?

MarkF from Azure team. The actors in Dapr are based on the same virtual actor concept that Orleans has, meaning that they are activated when called and eventually garbage collected. If you are familiar with Orleans, Dapr actors will be familiar. The difference with Dapr is that because it is programming language agnostic with an http/gRPC API the actors can be called from any language (although there are also friendly language SDKs on top).

Creating a new actor follows a local call like //method/" rel="nofollow">http://localhost:3500/v1.0/actors///meth...

for example http://localhost:3500/v1.0/actors/myactor/50/method/getData to call the getData method on myactor with id=50

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#108

Post by vturecek » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:04 PM UTC

sheeshkebab wrote: post #55

Trying to manage an “application” in microservices world is misunderstanding the whole concept of microservices, IMO.

Interestingly, what we found through our research was that nobody could agree on a definition of "application" in a microservices world. The way OAM is designed currently doesn't enforce a rigid "application" structure for services. We have a concept of application scopes that can be used to place application-like boundaries around groups of services (modeled as "components" in OAM). For example, grouping services in a "health" scope where the health of each service in the group is evaluated when any one of the services is upgraded as a trigger for automated rollback is something application scopes are designed for.

disclosure: am one of the OAM authors.

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#109

Post by mwjfussell » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

andy_ppp wrote: post #2

I’ve really thought that something like this was needed for a long time. Why isn’t there standardised containers for user management and permissions, authentication, scheduling things, processing events, caching say... there are off the shelf containers for simple things like proxying but nothing that understands your application. And it looks like they have taken it further to include Functions and Actors which migh…

MarkF from the Azure team. We thought so too. Having seen developers reinvent the same capabilities time and time again, and seen the frustration when my favorite framework X did not have a certain capability, we wanted to provide a distributed system building block approach. And one that can be just dropped in with local calls without having to recompile in many different libraries. It is an approach that we have found to provide easier extensibility and also support.

Re: Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices

#110

Post by vturecek » Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

jacques_chester wrote: post #102

gabrtv wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gabe from the Azure team here. The goal of OAM is to promote better layering of the development and operations functions inside any org. This is modeled from what we’ve learned about high-functioning teams operating Kubernetes at scale, plus what we’ve learned running services inside Microsoft. The desire to have software engineers focus only on business logic is strong. This tends to result in the creation of an int…

Pivotal Labs in fact has an entire practice focusing on teaching and evolving the practice of "Platform as a Product". Operations is more than "just" operations, it's an engineering practice. You're delivering capabilities to a customer, looking for ways to make everyone's lives easier and better and faster. I think that like folks at Azure, we evolved the approach based on experiences dogfooding various platforms, a…

Yes precisely! OAM is meant to provide some consistency and standardization to this practice, while fully expecting each platform to have unique capabilities and requirements that can be surfaced through the model. It's really illuminating how often we hear "oh hey we're trying to do something very similar to OAM!"