Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

influxdata.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 213 posts

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#111

Post by vidarh »

manigandham wrote: post #89
MBCook wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s trivial to start typing in Word. Spell checking is easy, as are basic formatting operations. Loading/saving work the way you’d expect. Yes you can write a dissertation with a ton of support from Word to make you life easier, but doing simple things is simple. It sounds like that’s what missing from kubectl. Even for a small start it takes a lot of knowledge. To continue the Word analogy, that sounds like LaT…

Doing simple things in Kubernetes is also simple. It's 1 line to get a pod up and running: kubectl run appname --image=yourimage You can then graduate to a basic YAML config file with a few lines and update with: kubectl apply -f yourfile.yaml At some point, if you want to build a distributed application, you need to know the concepts involved. Looking at it relatively, you needed to learn and deal with many more low…

You skip over setting up Kubernetes. And keeping it running.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#112

Post by EngineerBetter »

I was at KubeCon, and had a similar experience. Lots of engineers excites about all the technical possibilities, and less discussion of developer productivity.

It reminds me a little of in the 00's everyone thought their company should write its own CMS. I think we're in danger of every writing their own PaaS.

This is why things like Deis and Cloud Foundry exist. Most app developers should not have to understand the full depth and breadth of Kubernetes.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#113

Post by merb »

geerlingguy wrote: post #55
flor1s wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with saying "kubectl is the new ssh" is that it is simply not true in my opinion. Something more akin to "kubectl is to controlling a cluster as ssh is to controlling a server" would be more accurate I think. The point the OP makes about "Most Developers Don’t Have Google-Scale Problems" is true, I don't think you should use Kubernetes if your app consists of just a website and a database. But do people w…

IMO, only if you're working on like 100+ of them. If you just maintain a website using a traditional LAMP/LEMP stack, Rails, Node.js, or something like that it still makes more sense (unless you want to be 'trendy') to stick to primitives or use more managed hosting. But if you're maintaining a fleet of independent sites, Kubernetes' scheduling can make sense, despite the inherent complexity (TBH, you're going to hav…

K8s also makes sense if you have more than a single server. it's not as easy to keep all your servers up to date, without some automation.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#114

Post by manigandham »

hliyan wrote: post #103
manigandham wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a real understanding of the problem and possible solutions to actually solve something. Tools (regardless of complexity) only help you solve it once you understand. People tend to say Kubernetes is complicated because they don't understand the problems it's solving in the first place. If they did, it would be rather straightforward or they would recognize they don't need it in the first place.

Actually, my point was not that Kubernetes (and other "technologies" like it) is complicated, but that people tend to make it a be all and end all without actually understanding how it works under the hood. You're right about one thing: I've seen plenty of people proposing Kubernetes (or Docker Swarm or whatever) for simple systems that clearly don't need it.

We're saying the same thing. It's not magical/complicated/etc. It's a set of tools, that work great if you understand the underlying concepts and when to apply them.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#115

Post by _urga »

tananaev wrote: post #90
hliyan wrote: post #79

This whole image, to me, represents a big problem with software engineering today: https://twitter.com/dankohn1/status/989956137603747840 The industry is full of engineers who are experts in weirdly named "technologies" (which are really just products and libraries) but have no idea how the actual technologies (e.g. TCP/IP, file systems, memory hierarchy etc.) work. I don't know what to think when I meet engineers wh…

I have a mixed feeling about this. On one hand I definitely agree that it's good to know lower level technologies and that's something I always ask people in the interviews. I think it's important because I know it. On the other hand there is no end on how low you can go in the technology stack. Do you need to know how sockets works underneath? Low level network protocols? Do you need to know how hardware works becau…

"When we have modern libraries and frameworks"

I would question the assumption of having "modern" libraries, or at least rephrase it in terms of "performance" and "reliability":

Do we really have performant libraries (do they at least saturate the hardware)?

When it comes to networking, I think the answer is going to be more and more, no, we do not have performant libraries and software is being outpaced by hardware. Hardware is sitting idle thanks to our libraries.

Do we really have reliable libraries?

When it comes to storage, again I think the answer is no. For example, Linux RAID has long suffered from a plethora of faulty logic (pick a random disk sector as the canonical sector, split-brain etc.) and of course Linux RAID is not at the right layer to even have a chance of getting this right. And yet even ZFS lacks algorithms to detect or prevent split-brain. It's possible to detect (with 2 disks) and possible to prevent (with 3 or more disks), by taking quorum from the longest partially ordered set in the topology, but even ZFS (which is still awesome) is not reliable in this regard.

When it comes to networking, even TCP is not that reliable but has huge issues with bufferbloat. For example, a single person uploading a Gmail attachment on a 10mbps line will break the Internet for a second or two for everyone at your office (try it sometime - get everyone running "ping" and then upload an attachment). This is why Apple's background software update uses LEDBAT. Most libraries are not using LEDBAT or similar but are trusting TCP's congestion algorithms to do the right thing.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#116

Post by manigandham »

vidarh wrote: post #111
manigandham wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing simple things in Kubernetes is also simple. It's 1 line to get a pod up and running: kubectl run appname --image=yourimage You can then graduate to a basic YAML config file with a few lines and update with: kubectl apply -f yourfile.yaml At some point, if you want to build a distributed application, you need to know the concepts involved. Looking at it relatively, you needed to learn and deal with many more low…

You skip over setting up Kubernetes. And keeping it running.

If we're talking about the actual installation of a distributed system, then installing a distributed database isn't "easy" either, and also requires knowing the concepts so you know what you're doing.

Kubernetes is not going to be simpler or easier than the software that it's designed to run on top of itself, but it's not that hard anymore either. The installers work well, there are several distros with varying capabilities, or you can just use the public clouds like most where it's 1 button.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#117

Post by Jyaif »

_5meq wrote: post #98
manigandham wrote: post #51

Microsoft Word is also incredibly complex software with decades of development and features, and yet it's just a word processor. Everyone uses a small subset of the actual functionality which is why the entire system can be complex and simple at the same time, depending on your needs. It's exactly the same with Kubernetes. It's just clustering software that ties multiple servers together to give you an PaaS-like work…

YES. THIS!! I'm a single-person ops team for my startup. Granted, I MAY be an exceptional learner and not realize it, but I mostly consider myself an under-achieving stoner. I chose Kubernetes as our platform a few years ago and it's been absolutely wonderful and only getting better. Every once in a while I do a thought experiment with my co-workers to ensure Kubernetes is still the product for us. It is. We all love…

Obviously if you are spending thousands of dollars per month in infra then you are the target of K8s. The point of TFA is that most products fail before having to scale to that point.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#118

Post by Jyaif »

EngineerBetter wrote: post #112

I was at KubeCon, and had a similar experience. Lots of engineers excites about all the technical possibilities, and less discussion of developer productivity. It reminds me a little of in the 00's everyone thought their company should write its own CMS. I think we're in danger of every writing their own PaaS. This is why things like Deis and Cloud Foundry exist. Most app developers should not have to understand the…

Amen. Use PaaS as much as possible and fallback to running VMs as a last resort.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#119

Post by barrkel »

MBCook wrote: post #70
manigandham wrote: post #51

Microsoft Word is also incredibly complex software with decades of development and features, and yet it's just a word processor. Everyone uses a small subset of the actual functionality which is why the entire system can be complex and simple at the same time, depending on your needs. It's exactly the same with Kubernetes. It's just clustering software that ties multiple servers together to give you an PaaS-like work…

But it’s trivial to start typing in Word. Spell checking is easy, as are basic formatting operations. Loading/saving work the way you’d expect. Yes you can write a dissertation with a ton of support from Word to make you life easier, but doing simple things is simple. It sounds like that’s what missing from kubectl. Even for a small start it takes a lot of knowledge. To continue the Word analogy, that sounds like LaT…

K8s changed the way I thought software should be built, because it presents the data centre as an API.

K8s is also not that complicated after you grok it. It's also pretty easy to get started for simple cases. It's just that you need to switch your mindset a bit; but the benefits from the mental switch are non-negligble.

Re: Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

#120

Post by manigandham »

Jyaif wrote: post #117
_5meq wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. THIS!! I'm a single-person ops team for my startup. Granted, I MAY be an exceptional learner and not realize it, but I mostly consider myself an under-achieving stoner. I chose Kubernetes as our platform a few years ago and it's been absolutely wonderful and only getting better. Every once in a while I do a thought experiment with my co-workers to ensure Kubernetes is still the product for us. It is. We all love…

Obviously if you are spending thousands of dollars per month in infra then you are the target of K8s. The point of TFA is that most products fail before having to scale to that point.

It's not just scale, it's all the other helpful features which you get even with a tiny cluster.
Post reply on HN