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Do I Need Kubernetes?

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Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#101

Post by pc86 »

thiht wrote: post #50
gravypod wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makefiles are nice in theory but don't scale well to team members who don't know how to use make. If your team is full of experienced C/C++ devs then this will probably work great for you. If you are working with a bunch of android/javascript/etc developers who've never seen make, and who haven't exercised the skillset of reading through 3-decade-old email threads to find answers, you'll find that the only thing you'…

> Makefiles are nice in theory but don't scale well to team members who don't know how to use make Just learn it then? Running make commands is trivial. Writing basic make targets is trivial too.

Well the entire linked article and this entire thread (and all the others) could be boiled down to "Just learn [kubernetes,docker,whatever] then?" but that's not super helpful.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#102

Post by pc86 »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #20
thom wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask people who _don't_ use Kubernetes and maybe have architectures built on proprietary cloud services: how do you manage this?

Baroque organically grown scripts of arcana.

This is the correct answer for 99% of brownfield projects, especially those that didn't begin life on a cloud provider.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#103

Post by tootie »

thom wrote: post #9
gravypod wrote: post #6

> Run your applications in Docker from day 1 (with docker-compose it’s as valuable for dev as it is for production) and think carefully before letting your applications store local state. I think this is the key take away for many startups. Get it so you: 1. Have a single-command way to bring up your entire backend 2. That command can run on your dev machine 3. You document all of the settings for your containers and…

Can I ask people who _don't_ use Kubernetes and maybe have architectures built on proprietary cloud services: how do you manage this?

Ask every enterprise that existed prior to 2018? Even for small and mid-size enterprises, manual deploys aren't that huge of a deal. Automation with some bash scripts can get you pretty far. Especially if you're only managing a monolith or two. I've worked in some platforms that absolutely defied automation due to their proprietary nature. It just meant that we'd need a few people to spend 1-2 hours every two weeks to run a deployment. That cost added up over even a year or two is probably less than paying for a redesign and replatform.

I've also done deploys just using managed services like ECS/Fargate or Heroku where we just build an artifact and push it to the host with a script. A stack that's a load balancer, stateless app server then a DB and/or file store can be provisioned manually once then not really worried about for a long time.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#104

Post by gravypod »

watermelon0 wrote: post #92
abatilo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of projects these days that aim to use Kubernetes as a docker-compose environment. I personally use http://skaffold.dev/ with either a local Kubernetes cluster built with https://github.com/rancher/k3d or https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind . I think there's a very easy argument to be made that says that running K8s locally is overkill, but what I will say is that if you run your applications loca…

Neither k3d (k3s) nor kind support building of images since they use containerd directly, which [building] seems to be a requirement for development environment. This means that you need to build your app using Docker, and then import it to k3d/kind environment, thus needing local registry (not enabled by default), which means that images are duplicated.

Yea, exactly, this. I see all sorts of people making build systems and tools and they say you just do "my_command build my_target && docker-compose up -d" and I can't help but wonder: are these people ONLY developing 1 service? For me, that would be multiplied by 20x and we're not even at the number of services we're expecting.

We do a lot of integration with third parties which is essentially pull down some data and write it into a microservice responsible for keeping that data. Each of these integrations is owned by a separate engineer because it takes up a lot of time to deal with integration calls, planning, etc and we need to be language flexible (some people only give you a .dll or .jar, no choices).

I'm assuming people building these tools don't use a local development workflow because: their systems are too big to run on a single machine (Googlers) or don't work on large projects (open source side projects).

The clostest thing to what you and I are looking for, though, is skaffold and tilt.dev.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#105

Post by dajohnson89 »

gravypod wrote: post #6

> Run your applications in Docker from day 1 (with docker-compose it’s as valuable for dev as it is for production) and think carefully before letting your applications store local state. I think this is the key take away for many startups. Get it so you: 1. Have a single-command way to bring up your entire backend 2. That command can run on your dev machine 3. You document all of the settings for your containers and…

is there a performance hit with using databases inside docker?

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#106

Post by LockAndLol »

tombh wrote: post #32

I've always seen the story like this: It all started with Ruby. Ruby's syntactic sugar inspired the "syntactic sugar" of tooling, primarily Bundler and Rspec. Tooling, for what felt like the first time, became a first class citizen. Ruby's tooling made Heroku possible: ie, reproducible builds across; dev, testing, staging and production environments. Heroku's success was based on the primitives of the Twelve-Factor A…

Reading this, I doubt it can be taken as gospel.

> Store config in the environment

How do you pass hierarchical config? In JSON, YAML, TOML, etc., it's easy to group env vars, but how do you do that with env vars? LOGGING__HANDLER__FORMAT, LOGGING__HANDLER__ARGS__ARG1, LOGGING__HANDLER__ARGS__ARG2 ? If so, that looks positively awful. If the solution is passing a YAML or JSON string in the env variable, that sounds even worse than having a config file that the app reads.

>> it’s easy to mistakenly check in a config file to the repo

Add it to the ignore file. Someone would really have to force commit it to get into version control. Plus, even if it's stored in env vars, you're going to commit the values somewhere be it your Ansible secrets, SaltStack yml, Chef or Puppet repo, whatever.

To be fair, that's the only point I contend with. The rest is very reasonable.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#107

Post by EdwardDiego »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #73
overgard wrote: post #65

I think one of the underrated parts of using something like Kubernetes early (or even w/ simpler orchestrators like swarm or rancher), is that it encourages (and sometimes enforces) architecture best practices from the start. IE, you won't be storing state locally, you'll be able to handle servers being randomly killed, you'll already have horizontal scaling, etc. In my experience the hard part of migrating to contai…

I’m not avidly opposed to k8s by any means, but you can get these same properties from any of a variety of easier-to-use schedulers such as Fargate, Heroku, or even EC2 autoscaling groups. Of course, there are probably Kubernetes distributions that lower the threshold of using Kubernetes (and if there aren’t, there really should be) by providing solutions for logging, monitoring, certificate management, Functions (a…

> you can get these same properties from any of a variety of easier-to-use schedulers such as Fargate, Heroku, or even EC2 autoscaling group

Serious question, as I don't have any experience of those, can you scale based on a custom metric? It's probably the one feature of k8s I appreciate the most.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#108

Post by dennis_jeeves »

2mol wrote: post #33
kseistrup wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Betteridge’s law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. ⌘ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

I get it, but it's not really doing the author justice, who's trying to give a quite nuanced overview of where kubernetes is a good fit, and where it isn't. As somebody who's pretty skeptical about onboarding the big lump of complexity that is k8s, I really appreciated the information in the article.

You see, any pile of junk(Kubernetes being one of them) can have a use case if you searched hard enough. Do not learn/work with Kubernetes unless your livelihood depends on it.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#110

Post by mdaniel »

LockAndLol wrote: post #106
tombh wrote: post #32

I've always seen the story like this: It all started with Ruby. Ruby's syntactic sugar inspired the "syntactic sugar" of tooling, primarily Bundler and Rspec. Tooling, for what felt like the first time, became a first class citizen. Ruby's tooling made Heroku possible: ie, reproducible builds across; dev, testing, staging and production environments. Heroku's success was based on the primitives of the Twelve-Factor A…

Reading this, I doubt it can be taken as gospel. > Store config in the environment How do you pass hierarchical config? In JSON, YAML, TOML, etc., it's easy to group env vars, but how do you do that with env vars? LOGGING__HANDLER__FORMAT, LOGGING__HANDLER__ARGS__ARG1, LOGGING__HANDLER__ARGS__ARG2 ? If so, that looks positively awful. If the solution is passing a YAML or JSON string in the env variable, that sounds e…

> How do you pass hierarchical config? In JSON, YAML, TOML, etc., it's easy to group env vars, but how do you do that with env vars?

Spring Boot approaches that problem via `SPRING_APPLICATION_JSON` (and likely `SPRING_APPLICATION_YAML` but I haven't personally tried it)

    containers:
    - name: web
      image: whatever
      env:
      - name: SPRING_APPLICATION_JSON
        # language=json
        value: |
          {"spring": {"logging": {"level": "debug"}}}
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