Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

It is a really weak argument for Kubernetes for personal projects when the only realistic scenario is when the personal project is to learn Kubernetes.

The "quick-start" installation process on our homepage is `curl | bash` on a plain Ubuntu/Debian/Centos server (you can also run the commands manually, which are also outlined on that page). If you go through the web installer - which allows you to add your ssh key and setup a global domain - you'll be redirected to our deployment tutorial here: http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/deployment/application-deploy...

- Dokku homepage: http://dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/

I think the original article made a good point, and one that seems to be overlooked by pretty much every critical response: if you don't already know standard sysadmin tooling and procedures, then the value proposition for k8s for small projects alone is probably comparable to standard sysadmin tooling. At least with k8s, you can take that knowledge with you when you want to scale.

I don't know if I'm totally convinced by that argument alone, but it would be nice if every critical response didn't seem to assume that every hobbyist is born understanding systemd, ansible, packer, qemu, etc.

Well I work in higher-ed IT, where we don't make money sheepish grin and if I told you the amount of institutional inertia I've come up against while trying to get any part of our Development or Production stack shifted over to Kubernetes, which I consider myself fairly expert in, I think you'd understand that "containers on Solaris" is not going to go over any better for me than containers on GNU/Linux, a kernel and platform that we already support broadly.

I appreciate you engaged in good faith and got a lot of downvotes; I responded because I have had a serious problem here getting the institutional support for a modern devops stack (I've got a CS degree myself, but I mostly don't work on infrastructure, separation of duties and all that... I am a software developer in an environment where "buy not build" is the number one advice)

So when I see a stack mentioned that I haven't delved into before, I tend to want to know more about it. Like I said, thanks for humoring me and explaining.

We actually got a one-node Kubernetes instance stood up which I was able to trivially install Helm and Jenkins onto through the stable Jenkins chart for Helm. We use it now every day for our CI to build and test our internal apps. That Jenkins server took about a day to get together, and maybe a week to get it nailed down with ansible roles so that it would be reproducible.

Even if I had more control over these decisions, I can't see ever switching to SmartOS unless it had a vibrant packaging community and management system like Helm charts and kubeapps. That story is more than half of the value proposition for me. The other half is sleeping at night, and I'm glad you have that worked out ;-)

Another example, the other day I wanted to spin up WordPress so I could try out this novel plugin made by some friends of mine; I haven't run a Php app in years and I forget how to go about setting that up, and I definitely wasn't running a MySQL server any time in the last 3 years, so you can see this is getting to be non-trivial even if it sounds like it should not be.

Well Bitnami has contributed a WordPress and MariaDB chart to the stable charts repo, so it was about 5 minutes of effort to get this stood up in a production-ready style. (I wouldn't call it production ready exactly, but only because it took about 5 minutes to do, and I barely reviewed it at all before I was up and running, ready to install the plugin and give it a go.)

The MariaDB charts are certainly production grade, with persistent volumes hosted in a StatefulSet and easily configurable scaling with replication, again built to be as opaque and easy to deploy whole-cloth if desired for a configurer.

(edit: OK, but seriously I went looking, and sure enough... SmartOS has a documented path to install both WordPress and Jenkins. I guess I need to find some new examples...)

I'm telling you this because I disagree that Kubernetes is not an orchestrator; if you count Helm it is most certainly capable of orchestrating complex workloads.

I'm not trying to convert you, but I am trying to show that K8S has got some advantages that you can't easily recreate in SmartOS, and to emphasize again that for many of us, it's all about the community!

Have a great day, ^_^\/

I would say to the author that for most small/personal projects that dokku is probably about as extreme as you want/need. Use Docker for (Windows|Mac|Linux) locally as needed, and use dokku for your deploy target. A $40 DO/Linode vm will go a long way for small scale. I've even setup round-robin load balanced deployments, where the app just deploys to two hosts with the exact same config. Works great on smaller things.

Of course, if you're in a workplace on a project likely to see more than a few hundred simultaneous users in a given application, definitely look at what K8s offers.

Edit: as to deploys, get CI/CD working from your source code repository. GitLab, Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), CircleCI, Travis and so many others are free to very affordable for this. Take the couple hours to get this working, and when you want to update, just update your source repo in the correct branch.