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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#141

Post by ithkuil »

tombert wrote: post #114
silviogutierrez wrote: post #4

For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…

Swarm is still supported and works. I have it running on my home server and love it. Kubernetes is fine, but setting it up kind of feels like I'm trying to earn a PhD thesis. Swarm is dog-simple to get working and I've really had no issues in the three years that I've been running it. The configs aren't as elaborate or as modular as Kubernetes, and that's a blessing as well as a curse; it's easy to set up and adminis…

> setting it up kind of feels like I'm trying to earn a PhD thesis.

The kind of people who has to both set the cluster up and keep it up and also has to develop the application and deploy it and keep it up etc is not the target audience.

K8s shines when the roles of managing the cluster and running workloads on it are separated. It defines a good contract between infrastructure and workload. It lets different people focus on different aspects.

Yes it still has rough edges, things that are either not there yet, or vestigial complexity of wrong turns that happened through it's history. But if you look at it through the lense of this corporate scenario it starts making more sense than when you just think of what a full-stack dev in a two person startup would rather use and fully own/understand.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#142

Post by ForHackernews »

techntoke wrote: post #126
verdverm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people ought to do a side by side comparison of a new user learning to K8S v AWS v GCP before claiming Kubernetes adds more complexity than it returns in benefits. Remember the first time you saw the AWS console? And the last time?

Why do a comparison? K8S runs on AWS and GCP. They have managed services for setting up one. If you know K8S as a developer, then you simply consume the cloud K8S cluster.

That's exactly the point. You avoid lock-in to AWS or GCP by running on K8S instead. K8S becomes the "operating system": a standardized abstraction over different hardware.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#143

Post by p_l »

naringas wrote: post #67
p_l wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having extensively used Chef and K8s, the difference is that they try to deal with chaos in unmanaged way (Puppet is the closest to "managed"), but when dealing with wild chaos you lack many ways of enforcing the order. Plus they don't really do multi-server computation of resources. What k8s brings to the table is a level of standardization. It's the difference between bringing some level of robotics to manual loadi…

> Now I'm thinking of deploying k8s at home, not to learn, but because I know it's easier for me to deploy nextcloud, or an ebook catalog can't you do that just with containers?

I can do it with just containers, yes.

It would mean I removed ~20% of the things that were annoying me and left 80% still to solve, while kubernetes goes 80% for me with the remaining 20% being mostly "assembly these blocks".

Plus, a huge plus of k8s for me was that it abstracted away horrible interfaces and behaviours of docker daemon and docker cli.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#144

Post by nihil75 »

tristor wrote: post #118

The simple answer is that Kubernetes isn't really any of the things it's been described as. What it /is/, though, is an operating system for the Cloud. It's a set of universal abstraction layers that can sit on top of and work with any IaaS provider and allows you to build and deploy applications using infrastructure-as-code concepts through a standardized and approachable API. Most companies who were late on the Clo…

IaaS is not "the cloud". it was in 2008 when all we had was EC2 and RDS.

Today Kubernetes is the antithesis of the cloud - Instead of consuming resources on demand you're launching VMs that need to run 24/7 and have specific roles and names like "master-1". Might as well rent bare-metal servers. It will cost you less.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#145

Post by verdverm »

kelnos wrote: post #136
techntoke wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do a comparison? K8S runs on AWS and GCP. They have managed services for setting up one. If you know K8S as a developer, then you simply consume the cloud K8S cluster.

I think the point is that there are people that claim that k8s adds a ton of complexity to your environment. But if you compare k8s alone with managing your infrastructure using (non-k8s) AWS or GCP primitives, you'll find that the complexity is similar.

Exactly

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#146

Post by verdverm »

ForHackernews wrote: post #142
techntoke wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do a comparison? K8S runs on AWS and GCP. They have managed services for setting up one. If you know K8S as a developer, then you simply consume the cloud K8S cluster.

That's exactly the point. You avoid lock-in to AWS or GCP by running on K8S instead. K8S becomes the "operating system": a standardized abstraction over different hardware.

I argue this is a good thing, like the Linux kernel and the Chromium kernel

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#147

Post by kelnos »

jsmith12673 wrote: post #129
heipei wrote: post #50

My question is: Why is only k8s so popular when there are better alternatives for a large swath of users? I believe the answer is "Manufactured Hype". k8s is from a purely architectural standpoint the way to go, even for smaller setups, but the concrete project is still complex enough that it requires dozens of different setup tools and will keep hordes of consultants as well as many hosted solutions from Google/AWS/…

I got a bit disillusioned with k8s and looked at Nomad as an alternative. As a relatively noob sysadmin, I liked it a lot. Easy to deploy and easy to maintain. We've got a lot of mixed rented hardware + cloud VPS, and having one layer to unify them all seemed great. Unfortunately I had a hard convincing the org to give it a serious shot. At the crux of it, it wasn't clear what 'production ready' Nomad should look lik…

I'm sympathetic toward the idea of a system made of interchangeable parts, but I also kinda feel like it's a bit unrealistic, maybe? Even with well-defined interfaces, there will always be interop problems due to bugs or just people interpreting the interface specs differently. Every new piece to the puzzle adds another line (or several) to a testing matrix, and most projects just don't have the time and resources to do that kind of testing. It's unfortunate, but IMO understandable that there's often a well-tested happy path that everyone should use, even when theoretically things are modular and replaceable.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#148

Post by archsurface »

silviogutierrez wrote: post #4

For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…

I'm not sure "a plain ol' Django monolith" with none of the "fancy stuff" is either what people are referring to when they say "kubernetes", or a great choice for that. I could run hello world on a Cray but that doesn't mean I can say I do supercomputing. Our team does use it for all the fancy stuff, and spends all day everyday for years now yamling, terraforming, salting, etc so theoretically our setup is "entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible", but if it fell apart tomorrow, I'd run for the hills. Basically, I think you're selling it from a position which doesn't use it to any degree which gives sufficient experience required to give in-depth assessment of it. You're selling me a Cray based on your helloworld.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#149

Post by kureikain »

Before K8S, to run a service you need:

- Setup VM: and their dependencies, tool chain. If you use thing like package that has native component such as image processing you event need to setup some compiler on the VM - Deployment process - Load balancer - Systemd unit to auto restart it. Set memory limit etc.

All of that is done in K8S. As long as you ship a Dockerfile, you're done.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#150

Post by aprdm »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #91
silviogutierrez wrote: post #4

For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…

So are you saying that, no matter what, if you want to reply your whole infrastructure as code (networks, dmz, hosts, services, apps, backups etc ) that you are going to have to reproduce that somehow (whatever the combo of AWS services are, OR just learn K8S Effectively, "every infrastructure as code project will reimplement Kubernetes in Bash"

Not necessarily. You can have all of above with Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef... etc.
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