It’s funny that for an exactly same workload on AWS on raw Ec2 it ends up cheaper than the same cluster size on EKS…
That is true of every managed service on AWS.
Do you really need Kubernetes?
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#22Your first full-time sysadmin is an expensive hire. So is your first DBA. And even if your database backups are working now, there's a good chance they'll silently break in the next several years. The simplest thing you could do is to build a single-container application, and deploy it a Heroku-like system with a fully managed database. If this actually works for your use case, then definitely avoid Kubernetes. But e…
> At this point, a managed Kuberentes cluster is no worse than any other option
Except in terms of pricing...?
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#23I’m sceptical of this article. I’m an indy dev using K8s at vultr (VKS) and it’s absolutely simplified my life.
The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s, but if I do that, I now have to manage an entire operating system. I have to make sure the OS is up to date, and balance all the nuances this entails, especially balancing downtimes, and recovery from upgrades. Major OS upgrades are hard, and pretty much guarantee downtime unless you’re running multiple instances in which case how are you managing them?
Contrast to VKS where, with much less effort, OS upgrades are rolled out to nodes with no downtime to my app. Yes, getting to this point takes a little bit of effort, but not much. And yes, I have multiple redundant VPS, which is more expensive, but that’s a feature.
K8s is perhaps overly verbose, and like all technologies it has a learning curve, but im gonna go out on a limb here and say that I’ve found running a managed K8s service like VKS is way easier than managing even a single Debian server, and provides a pile of functionality that is difficult or impossible to achieve with a single VPS.
And the moment you have more than one VPS, it needs to be managed, so you’re back at needing some kind of orchestration.
The complexity of maintaining a unix system should not be underestimated just because you already know how to do it. K8s makes my life easier because it does not just abstract away the underlying node operating system, it obviates it. In doing so, it brings its own complexities, but there’s nothing I miss about managing operating systems. Nothing.
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#24There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…
That's like recommending people to buy a trailer to haul their groceries because transportation companies make a profit on hauling cargo.
Maybe some people do need a trailer, maybe some do not. As long as you don't blindly follow the cloud you can also profit from them.
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#25There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…
Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. I'm expected to write a service like s3?
Well, you could deploy Minio.
I see Kubernetes as an enabler. Grab some commodity hardware - your own or Linode - and have a cloud experience using open-source components.
I just wish Kubernetes wasn’t so darn complicated.
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#26There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…
> Not having hardware is someone else's profit. But it's also someone else's economies of scale. The chances of me getting datacenter space, hardware, bandwidth, and expert 24/7 staffing at the same volume discounts they do is... slim. Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.
There's a middle ground - there are plenty of providers that will give you a turn key "insert credit card here, get root SSH access" experience similar to AWS EC2 but on physical hardware and at much smaller margins. See OVH, Equinix Metal, Hetzner, Packet, etc.
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#27Your first full-time sysadmin is an expensive hire. So is your first DBA. And even if your database backups are working now, there's a good chance they'll silently break in the next several years. The simplest thing you could do is to build a single-container application, and deploy it a Heroku-like system with a fully managed database. If this actually works for your use case, then definitely avoid Kubernetes. But e…
> At this point, a managed Kuberentes cluster is no worse than any other option Except in terms of pricing...?
K3s adds minor overhead to my single node $8/mo vps.
Edit: no, not managed. Quite easy to get started with though.
Edit2: took ~440MB of ram & 3% CPU (most of the CPU is the local storage provisioner, weirdly?). Why? Because it was much easier than continuing to maintain and run the handcraft Ansible scripts I've done over the years, and let me easily manage DNS, certs, metrics, two dbs, and its easier to reuse these on my other infra than any other option.
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#28There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…
I fully agree with your last paragraph, but not sure what it has to do with cloud infrastructure specifically. AWS also leverages huge economies of scale into profit, it's not like you're going to realize equivalent margins by running your own little server in a colo somewhere. You certainly won't realize equivalent availability, scalability, security, support ecosystem, etc with it either. Cloud infra can make a lot…
> it's not like you're going to realize equivalent margins by running your own little server in a colo somewhere
There are a lot of projects where the bandwidth charges alone would make self-managed on-prem come out ahead, and I'm not even talking the instant 2-3x performance boost you get by moving to real hardware instead of overprovisioned cloud VM hosts.
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#29There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…
There is more to this: who is you?
If you are the owner who foots the bill and has the capability to run your own infra then nothing beats it. If you don't have the capability then cloud throws you the lifeline at a price of course. Pay for it and be happy.
If you are the guy who runs/manages the infra for someone: then there is no point in saving dollars. You peddle Kubernetes and go to the kubecon and post all about it on linkedin and establish yourself as a kubernetes expert. When the owner of current gig goes under, you will have a bunch of job offers to pick from.
Besides, kubernetes solves a problem very elegantly that most companies do not have. Not everyone is google and running apps on web scale with an expectation of 99.99% uptime...
Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At this point, a managed Kuberentes cluster is no worse than any other option Except in terms of pricing...?
K3s adds minor overhead to my single node $8/mo vps. Edit: no, not managed. Quite easy to get started with though. Edit2: took ~440MB of ram & 3% CPU (most of the CPU is the local storage provisioner, weirdly?). Why? Because it was much easier than continuing to maintain and run the handcraft Ansible scripts I've done over the years, and let me easily manage DNS, certs, metrics, two dbs, and its easier to reuse these…
Is this "managed Kubernetes" then?