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Will Kubernetes Collapse Under the Weight of Its Complexity?

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

#151

Post by erikb »

atombender wrote: post #23
nicodjimenez wrote: post #6

The funny thing about Kubernetes is that I read somewhere that it's not actually widely used within Google (please correct me if I'm wrong). Given that's it's a complicated piece of software and that Google has extremely complicated requirements, that's pretty concerning. To me, we've barely starting to solve deployments, the idea of Kubernetes seems a little ahead of it's time. If you're using GPC I do hear it's rea…

Google uses Borg internally, and Kubernetes is really their third container orchestration system. After Borg came Omega, which was never deployed, but ended up being a test bed for a lot of innovations that were folded back into Borg. But Borg is a decade old and has a lot of warts (according to its designers), and with Kubernetes they aimed to learn from their mistakes and improve on the design. As far as I can tell…

The devs totally forgot that in a normal environment you don't have the 10.000 other internal Google tools, though.

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

#152

Post by kazen44 »

erikb wrote: post #142
ShroudedNight wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to go all the way down the software stack makes it much, much easier to keep said stack honest. Debugging is often a desperate attempt at establishing ground truth. Without a low-level understanding, you're always a the mercy of your tools, and how they have decided to curate the information they're feeding you. Even the most well-meaning curation can be so frustratingly deceiving as to incite violence, an…

You can make sense of all the back and forth in k8s networking? That needs more than package capturing I suppose. How do you translate a million packages into something useful?

most of k8s networking is actually not part of k8s? They don't really have a integrated overlay network except for kube-proxy. (which is lackluster).

If you are running k8s, you should run a proper overlay network first.

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

#153

Post by erikb »

jrs95 wrote: post #16

The complexity of Kubernetes largely reflects the complexity of the problem. Nobody has delivered anything significantly simpler that hasn’t had a much smaller scope, and those tools approach the same level of complexity when composed with others to get the same level of functionality. But setting up Kubernetes is both well documented and automated on multiple cloud providers, whereas something like Nomad & Consul do…

> The complexity of Kubernetes largely reflects the complexity of the problem.

I can solve most of these problems with a simple Linux + systemd in a much more readable way and am finished much quicker, even now that I am using k8s full time for 2 years.

So, no. What it represents is the complexity of the community having multiple sources of requirements, and the complexity of the landscape with everybody trying to make a claim with their name+logo without investing too much into a full stack answer.

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

#154

Post by pas »

erikb wrote: post #128

Exactly what I'm always saying. It's also nearly impossible in an Enterprise IT environment to get Kubernetes working on your laptop. Minikube and Docker Edge both seem to fail way too often. As a developer one wants to spin up a system to work on, then work on it, then push results to some repo. And this loop simply isn't possible (yet?). Also what the author didn't mention is that even the vanilla k8s stuff is alre…

> It's also nearly impossible in an Enterprise IT environment to get Kubernetes working on your laptop.

huh? What does that mean? Maybe that means the environment is broken, not the software you want to use/work on.

> For instance, why should a developer even know what an ingress is and that it might be something he needs?

Then probably that dev shouldn't work with k8s. At all.

If the dev wants/needs a hello world on a domain/IP, then they need a web hosting service provider. (ghost.org) Or a PaaS (Heroku), or they can spin up a VM on DigitalOcean and follow any of the thousand Ubuntu Nginx Website Hosting tutorials on HowToForge.

If they already have dozens of VMs, scores of containers, and they are fighting with monitoring and config management, then they might need k8s.

And a lot of folks do need this level of infrastructure and infrastructure management (automation, abstraction, standardization, etc).

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

#155

Post by cmorgan8506 »

As an app developer, I can vouch for finding k8 to feel frustratingly complex.

My current client work has recently shifted to using k8. I took the time to get minikube working locally to get a better understanding. It definitely helped, but I find the layers of abstraction hard to grok after not working with it for a while.

I can see the value the tool offers, but I get the feeling it's supposed to be reserved for higher degrees of scale than the average 2-8 node app.

Black box is how I feel about it sometimes. Hopefully I'll get more one on one time with it in the future. It seems like a really cool technology.

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

#156

Post by pas »

discodave wrote: post #129
manigandham wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capa…

Compare to setting up a Lambda application with a DynamoDB or Aurora database. Very simple, has limitations but you get a scalable distributed system for (almost) no time investment.

You can buy hosted k8s, one click, and your cluster is ready.

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/

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

#157

Post by kazen44 »

discodave wrote: post #129
manigandham wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 capa…

Compare to setting up a Lambda application with a DynamoDB or Aurora database. Very simple, has limitations but you get a scalable distributed system for (almost) no time investment.

well, this is mainly because the hard part is abstracted away from you by amazon.

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

#158

Post by pas »

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.

A distributed system will never be as intuitive as MS Word, which is basically the digitized version of stone tables, or papyrus, or whatever thousands of years old thing we are already familiar with.

Or just remain a bit more strict and look at typewriters. Word is a typewriter. People look at typewriters and sort of understand them after pushing one-two buttons. Yes, there are hidden gems and details and a long road from mechanical typewriters to Word and laser printers (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw ), but people are a lot more intuitive about these pieces of hardware and software, because they are simply updates on existing tech.

Distributed systems is a new, and hitherto an explicitly unknown concept for many people.

And with minikube you can set up k8s as easily as MS Office. (Or you can use Typhoon https://typhoon.psdn.io .. )

And it's trivial to package up all this into a website, like Office 365 and GKE https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/ .

Or you can run it on your own PC with minikube and Virtualbox/KVM/qemu, and similarly you can install Office locally. But it does not make sense for one and it increasingly makes less for the other too.

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

#159

Post by pas »

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…

https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/ .. easy as Office365.

With GitLab you can deploy to k8s directly. Like Word and let's say SharePoint.

Also, there are a lot of folks doing this commoditization and packaging up k8s in various ways to make it more usable for a wider audience.

You're comparing k8s to Word instead of Windows kernel. Or maybe instead of .NET.

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

#160

Post by hennsen »

Basically agree that simple things should be simple and complex things possible - and that’s from my experience not yet met with standard k8s.

And having no „end users“ (app developers) on a conference about tools that should serve exactly these is an interesting observation to investigate further.

Having to install one mire tool to get ready for production apps installed with helm in one command is not asked too much, though.

Then, slighty unrelated, but it comes to my mind:

i wonder if this happy path thing works with influx, where the author is working.

Can i have a simple single command and install everything i need to look at logs from my app and db server, see most important performance stats and http/ip access logs, geaphical as well as with notifications if certain, easily to be entered ( and in case of cou, io, ram and diskspace reasonable defaults like 80% or so) thresholds are met?

Can i do that with only the free open source tools as the author expects it from the k8s ecosystem? Or do i get it when buying influx‘s professional service?

So maybe it’s the job of, and an opportunity for, commercial companies to develop and sell such simplifying tools. At some place, developers time to develop all these things must be paid for - if millions of developers just use the perfectly polished open source tools - and a high percentage doesn’t even help in development with big reports, not to think of patches, what are the developers going to live from while doing the polishing/ simplifying?

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