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Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

carlosrdrz.es

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Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#171

Post by whydoineedthis »

caymanjim wrote: post #105

Kubernetes is just one of many development ecosystem tools that solve real problems and, once you know them, make your life easier. The arguments in this article can apply to any development tool or practice. Why separate your code into multiple files? Why write tests? Why use a code linter? Why use virtual environments? Why write a Makefile? If you're working on a small personal project, or you're a newer developer…

> tools that solve real problems and, once you know them, make your life easier.

yep, i think you nailed here.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#172

Post by outworlder »

nimbius wrote: post #58

I work as an engine mechanic full time, and im learning programming as a hobby. Kubernetes to me is like the shade-tree mechanic vs the professional. Professional mechanics use high grade tools that can cost thousands of dollars each. We have laser alignment rigs, plasma cutters, computer controlled balancing and timing hardware, and high performance benchmarking hardware that can cost as much as the car you're worki…

The analogy shouldn't be hobbyists versus professionals.

It's more like you building your own car versus a Toyota manufacturing plant. You may think procuring and programming the robots to be an overkill for a single car, but it makes sense for a factory.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#173

Post by whydoineedthis »

Draiken wrote: post #50
jypepin wrote: post #5

I totally agree with this article. I'm giving a point of a view of a pure developer who knows nothing about DevOps things and managing servers. I kind of know what NGINX is and barely know how to configure something like systemd. I recently setup a digital ocean droplet and setup my blog there to actually understand how it works. It was great because I learned a ton and feel in control. Pretty simple setup - single d…

> I understand it gets expensive quickly, but I really want to see the cost difference of Heroku vs the time spent for the engineering team to manage all the complexities of devops, automated deploys, scaling, and I'm not even mentioning all the data/logging/monitoring things that Heroku allows to add with 1 click. Well, if you use a k8s cluster on GKE for example, you will have literally all those things by default.…

unless you already know how to do it. i can setup a production ready cluster in under a day and as long as things are containerized, run them likety split. Hardly insane once you know how it works.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#174

Post by theptip »

carlisle_ wrote: post #165
admax88q wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But maybe I envision my side project turning into full-time startup some day. The state of the art for cluster management will probably something completely different by then. Better to build a good product now and if you really want to turn it into a startup, productionize it then. > Maybe I see all the news about Kubernetes and think it would be cool to be more familiar with it. If learning Kubernetes _is_ your s…

> taking more time away from actually building your side project and putting it into building infrastructure around your side project. I generally dislike this way of thinking. Infrastructure is a core component of whatever it is you're building, not an afterthought. Maybe you can defer things until a little bit later, but if you can build with infrastructure in mind you'll be saving yourself so many headaches down t…

> Infrastructure is a core component of whatever it is you're building

That's true in some sense -- but you can get surprisingly far using a PaaS like Heroku to abstract that infrastructure away.

I'm a big fan of Kubernetes, and use it in production at my company, but I would not recommend using k8s in a prototype/early-stage startup unless you're already very familiar with the tool. The complexity overhead of k8s is non-trivial, and switching from Heroku to something like k8s doesn't involve undoing much work, since setting up Heroku is trivial.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#175

Post by ABCLAW »

carlisle_ wrote: post #165
admax88q wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But maybe I envision my side project turning into full-time startup some day. The state of the art for cluster management will probably something completely different by then. Better to build a good product now and if you really want to turn it into a startup, productionize it then. > Maybe I see all the news about Kubernetes and think it would be cool to be more familiar with it. If learning Kubernetes _is_ your s…

> taking more time away from actually building your side project and putting it into building infrastructure around your side project. I generally dislike this way of thinking. Infrastructure is a core component of whatever it is you're building, not an afterthought. Maybe you can defer things until a little bit later, but if you can build with infrastructure in mind you'll be saving yourself so many headaches down t…

>Infrastructure is a core component of whatever it is you're building, not an afterthought.

Great, so use something appropriate for a small side project which in 99.99% of cases will not be k8.

Unless the small side project is learning cluster management. In which case go nuts.

K8's operating cost ($) might be manageable for a small project, but that doesn't mean the upfront learning and implementation costs (hrs) don't exist.

Your time isn't infinite.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#176

Post by hosh »

I have deployed by hand, with Capistrano, with Chef, with Heroku, with systemd, with Docker, with AWS EC2, and with Kubernetes.

Like everything, there are tradeoffs. If there were a fairly easy way to do a one-node Kubernetes setup (say, Minikube), I would probably just go that route. One doesn't have to use the full feature set of Kubernetes to get one or two things that are advantageous.

As it is, I setup Minikube for the dev machines for the team I am on. I might consider Kubernetes for my personal side project if I knew Minikube would do well for machines under 1 GB of memory (it doesn't really).

The pre-emptible VMs that cost less than $5 is interesting, and I might do something like that.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#177

Post by dsnuh »

whydoineedthis wrote: post #173
Draiken wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand it gets expensive quickly, but I really want to see the cost difference of Heroku vs the time spent for the engineering team to manage all the complexities of devops, automated deploys, scaling, and I'm not even mentioning all the data/logging/monitoring things that Heroku allows to add with 1 click. Well, if you use a k8s cluster on GKE for example, you will have literally all those things by default.…

unless you already know how to do it. i can setup a production ready cluster in under a day and as long as things are containerized, run them likety split. Hardly insane once you know how it works.

An on-prem "production ready" k8s cluster in under a day? What kind of businesses are you setting this up for? Are these all greenfield projects? I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe that.

We run on-prem k8s, on bare metal and VMs. Integration with existing storage (we use NetApp Solidfire and NFS), load balancers, firewalls, backup strategy, DR, etc. takes weeks, if not months of work. But we may disagree on what "production ready" means.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#179

Post by vel0city »

solatic wrote: post #49
carlosrdrz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree with you, but I don't think I really missed the point of the original article. From the original article: > However popular wisdom would suggest that Kubernetes is an overly complex piece of technology only really suitable for very large clusters of machines; that it carries a large operational burden and that therefore using it for anything less than dozens of machines is overkill. I think that's probably…

> using it for anything less than dozens of machines is overkill The question isn't really whether you need dozens of machines, it's whether you can foresee eventually maybe needing dozens of machines. Remember the bad old days when people said that relational databases were worthless because they "don't scale", that using Mongo and other NoSQL databases were practically a necessity for doing anything modern and "web…

You don't really need to jump into Kubernetes to be prepared to eventually migrate to it. As long as you're using some kind of compatible containerization platform it is not incredibly hard to shift those workloads to Kubernetes. If you're really only needing to run a small handful of containers, running them directly in Docker or rkt isn't challenging and has very little operational overhead compared to running a full k8 cluster.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#180

Post by n0w »

weberc2 wrote: post #145
wpietri wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, as somebody who is building a small Kubernetes cluster right now at home just for the fun of it: I think using Kubernetes for small projects is mostly a bad idea. So I appreciate the author warning people so they don't get misled by all the (justified) buzz around it. For your average developer who just wants to get something running on a port, Kubernetes introduces two barriers: containerization and Kube…

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 convinc…

This is the thing I think most people miss when they complain about the complexity of Kubernetes. If you already know how to use standard sysadmin tools it looks like a lot of additional knowledge to achieve similar outcomes. These people seem to forget that there is a lot of complexity in their sysadmin tools too.
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