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

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

#171

Post by tyingq » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

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…

My favorite part of this is that now K8S by itself isn't enough. People are laying "service mesh" and other things on top of it. And, yeah, I get the sales pitch for it, but at some point, it's too much.

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

#172

Post by jtchang » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

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…

Is that yaml not an array of strings?

["x","y","z"]

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

#173

Post by alias_neo » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

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 declarative approach is a more sustainable way to run Kubernetes. If you define some desired state in manifests and apply them to a cluster, they can be applied again to new clusters or the same one and Kubernetes will attempt to maintain the desired state.

This state can be version controlled, written in stone, whatever you prefer and it can always be attained.

When administrators start issuing imperative commands to a cluster, state starts being changed and there is no record[0] of the state Kubernetes is being asked to maintain.

[0] Not entirely true, the state can always be retrieved from the cluster so long as it hasn't failed.

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

#174

Post by haspok » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

It's like saying that you won't need human workers because you'll have robots doing the work. Aha, sure, but who is going to program those robots?...

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

#175

Post by mihaigalos » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

sgarland wrote: post #136

throwaway894345 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not dumb, you're just new to it, and it's fundamentally hard stuff anyways, and if you can find a higher-level abstraction that lets you get work done faster, then all the better. However, the question is comparing Kubernetes to traditional VM-based infrastructure (especially with pet nodes) whereas you're comparing Kubernetes to a higher-level abstraction. For what it's worth, deploying in Kubernetes is prett…

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

Spot on!

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

#176

Post by aliswe » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

rfoo wrote: post #89

jmillikin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the pod networking implementation (a whole virtual IP space!!) That part, at least, can be made simple: https://john-millikin.com/stateless-kubernetes-overlay-netwo... > DNS, loadbalancing, persistent volumes, monitoring, etc etc None of that is part of Kubernetes, and you'll need it (or not) regardless of how you choose to handle process scheduling. There's a sort of common idea that a "Kubernetes cluster" is an e…

> None of that is part of Kubernetes Well, load balancing is part of Kubernetes (except that it does not provide a sane implementation), and tbh having to debug strange failures caused by seemingly-innocent Service configuration is my least-favorite part of Kubernetes. I agree with you on other points.

DNS too

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

#177

Post by amoe_ » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

rahen wrote: post #57

Kubernetes can really help bringing more scalability. All you need is to rewrite your application (think microservices), reduce cold latency (get rid of anything VM based such as Java, or rewrite in Spring or Quarkus), use asynchronous RPC, and decouple compute and storage. Then you need an elastic platform, for instance Kubernetes, with all the glue around such as Istio, and Prometheus, and Fluentd, and Grafana, Jae…

> If what you want is... automated, predictable deployments... then Docker Compose and Terraform is all you need.

Can you elaborate on the deployment story here a bit?

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

#178

Post by Filligree » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

jtchang wrote: post #172

heretogetout wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that yaml not an array of strings? ["x","y","z"]

I don't happen to have a YAML parser at hand, but I believe it's...

["x", True, "z"]

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

#179

Post by heretogetout » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

jtchang wrote: post #172

heretogetout wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that yaml not an array of strings? ["x","y","z"]

It's not, y is treated as boolean true.

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

#180

Post by moomin » Wed, Jun 01, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

Let me answer your question with another question: if Microsoft Word is so good, why are there so many people whose job it is to produce documents?

Now, I’m not saying k8s is as transformative as the word processor, but if it was, you’d probably expect to see more ops people, not fewer. They’d just be doing different things.