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Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#161

Post by Avalaxy »

astrospective wrote: post #151
Avalaxy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice I don't agree. I spun up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, which was indeed easy. But then I had to figure out how to write the correct deployment scripts to deploy my docker containers to it, and how to configure all the security stuff. After more than a week of tryin…

Container instances are pretty good really, the app service for containers is pretty good too. I’ve been playing with k8s because that’s what everyone thinks they want and need to be able to speak to it, and use it when the time comes, but I’ve yet to run into a case where I really thought it was necessary, for the platform I work on (millions of users, big number of transactions per second).

Do you use ACI at that scale? It's interesting how Microsoft also promotes AKS rather than ACI. For Azure ML they even explicitly state that ACI should not be used for production purposes, which I find quite curious.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#162

Post by ryapric »

I_dev_outdoors wrote: post #146
sgarland wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, do not manage deployments with imperative kubectl commands, I beg of you.

I probably wouldn't do this, but what problem does this cause?

The same problems any imperative management within declarative config causes -- drift. If the tool you're using supports declarative configuration, all changes should be made exclusively via the declarative interface to prevent that drift. In this example, the new image should be added to the original manifest itself, not via a CLI update.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#163

Post by iteratorx »

patrickserrano wrote: post #75
caymanjim wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And a service configuration, ingress, other networking, persistent volumes, a mechanism for updating deployed applications, management of the nodes (even with a managed service like EKS or other cloud solutions), logging, roles, security, etc. If you're a developer and all you have to worry about is one deployment spec, thank your devops team for making your life easier. Kubernetes is great for making the dev team's…

Couldn't agree with this more. At my last company there was a fair bit of time put into making the deployment process for our microservices as simple as added a new YAML file to the deployment repo. That file pulled a custom chart, and as a dev you just needed to configure a few variables to get everything up an running. But if you were deploying something that couldn't use one of the pre-configured charts it was a b…

You can now do something similar with Bunnyshell.com

It Handles the devops jobs for dev teams.

Full disclosure, I work for Bunnyshell.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#164

Post by namaria »

caymanjim wrote: post #14

The premise of your question is invalid. Have you ever tried setting up a Kubernetes cluster and deploying apps in it? Kubernetes doesn't save work, it adds work. In return, you get a lot of benefits, but it wasn't designed to reduce human work, nor was it designed to eliminate devops jobs. It was designed for scalability and availability more than anything. Most people using Kubernetes should be using something simp…

This is exactly what the "automation destroys jobs" argument gets wrong. When aggregate output becomes cheaper, aggregate demand increases.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#165

Post by jrockway »

everfrustrated wrote: post #107
belter wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who watched "Kubernetes: The Documentary" knows the answer: https://youtu.be/BE77h7dmoQU Kubernetes only exists, because Google lost the Cloud Wars, and this was their Hail Mary pass.

And I might cynically offer it was "invented" to solve the problem of ex-googlers not having any useful immediately transferable skills as the Google internal tech stack had nothing in common with industry.

That's not really been my experience. The number of people who knew how to deploy software at Google was much smaller than the number of people writing software there. I was certainly the only person on my team who ever dealt with the nitty gritty of running stuff in production. That seems about like the industry standard; I'd say the average software engineer in industry, inside or outside Google, considers their work done when their code is merged.

At my first job outside of Google we used something called Convox, which was very similar to running things in production at Google. You triggered a package build from your workstation (!) and then adjusted production to pick that up. Very similar to mpm packages and GCL files. (The difference is that Google had some machinery to say "while the build might have been triggered from a workstation, all this code has actually been checked in and reviewed". Convox did not have that part, so yeah, you could just edit some files and push them to production without checking them in, which wasn't great. But when you are a 4 person development team, not the end of the world by any means.)

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#166

Post by spyspy »

caymanjim wrote: post #14

The premise of your question is invalid. Have you ever tried setting up a Kubernetes cluster and deploying apps in it? Kubernetes doesn't save work, it adds work. In return, you get a lot of benefits, but it wasn't designed to reduce human work, nor was it designed to eliminate devops jobs. It was designed for scalability and availability more than anything. Most people using Kubernetes should be using something simp…

> Most people using Kubernetes should be using something simpler, but that's a separate problem.

This has been the biggest drain on my career. Everyone wants to be an "engineer" ready to handle every problem like its the next facebook. Like bruh, this service is going to get like 100 req/hour max and only when the sun is up - just **ing throw it on cloud run. We can tell the only thing you want to build is your resume.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#167

Post by sgarland »

I_dev_outdoors wrote: post #146
sgarland wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, do not manage deployments with imperative kubectl commands, I beg of you.

I probably wouldn't do this, but what problem does this cause?

Drift, as the other child comment mentions, but also loss of version control. I do not want to have to trawl through someone's shell history to figure out what they changed, nor do I want to have to redirect `kubectl get foo -o yaml` output into diff.

If everything is in code, and you have a reasonable branching strategy, it's much easier to control change, to rollback bad merges, to run pre-hooks like security checks and configuration validation tools, etc.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#168

Post by aliswe »

heretogetout wrote: post #155
Avalaxy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all 3 major clouds offer "canned" k8s services that you can set up in a ridiculously short amount of time with Terraform and your CI platform of choice I don't agree. I spun up a Kubernetes cluster in Azure, which was indeed easy. But then I had to figure out how to write the correct deployment scripts to deploy my docker containers to it, and how to configure all the security stuff. After more than a week of tryin…

I hear you about feeling dumb. I think some early decisions in the k8s ecosystem led to a lot of wasted time and effort, and this frustration. YAML: significant whitespace is always unwelcome but YAML also introduces unexpected problems, like how it deals with booleans. For example, say you have this array: foo: - x - y - z You might think this is an array of strings, but you'd be wrong. It's also difficult to read t…

for what its worth, and if im not mostaken, there is some support for JSON, ie. kubectl get deployment xyz -o json

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#169

Post by phoehne »

I think that part of the problem in general tech is that many developers don't understand they're being marketed to. I really have no opinion on whether or not K8s is a smart choice, and will save you time and effort, require more effort but provide benefits, or is a bad trade-off. But the crazy push for k8s as the one size fits all solution for everything that you get from some corners of the webs smells like hype cycle.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#170

Post by sgarland »

tapoxi wrote: post #15

From my experience, Kubernetes drastically reduces the number of DevOps people required. My current place has a team of 5, compared to a similarly sized, vmware-centric place I worked at a decade ago with a team of 14. But DevOps means many things because it's not clearly defined, which also makes it difficult to hire for. It's a "jack-of-all-trades" role that people somehow fell into and decided to do instead of mor…

> Also, from what I've experienced from our internship program, CS programs are really bad at covering these fundamentals. Students aren't learning such basics as version control, ci/cd, cloud platforms, linux, etc.

That's because those things are not part of Computer Science, or so I'm told. I got a degree in Software Engineering and regret nothing.

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