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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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231–240 of 681 posts

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#231
post #21

I'd say it's down to two things. First is the sheer amount of work they're putting into standardization. They just ripped out some pretty deep internal dependencies to create a new storage interface. They have an actual standards body overseen by the Linux Foundation. So I agree with the blog post there. The second reason is also about standards, but using them more assertively. Docker had way more attention and acti…

> By limiting the Docker features they would use, they leveled the playing field between Docker and other runtimes, making Docker much less exciting. Isn't the most popular k8s case to deploy Docker images still though?

It's confusing, but Docker images (and image registries) are also an open standard that Docker implements [1].

A lot of the Kubernetes "cool kids" just run containerd instead of Docker. Docker itself also runs containerd, so when you're using Kubernetes with Docker, Kubernetes has to basically instruct Docker to set up the containers the same way it would if it were just talking to containerd directly. From a technical perspective, you're adding moving parts for no benefit.

If you use containerd in your cluster, you can then use Docker to build and push your images (from your own or a build machine), but pull and run them on your Kubernetes clusters without Docker.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Container_Initiative

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "a plain ol' Django monolith" with none of the "fancy stuff" is either what people are referring to when they say "kubernetes", or a great choice for that. I could run hello world on a Cray but that doesn't mean I can say I do supercomputing. Our team does use it for all the fancy stuff, and spends all day everyday for years now yamling, terraforming, salting, etc so theoretically our setup is "entire ap…

Reading this charitably: I guess I agree. k8s is definitely overpowered for my needs. And I'm almost certain my blog or my business will never need that full power. Fully aware of that. But I'm not sure one can find something of "the right power" that has the same support from cloud providers, the open source community, the critical mass, etc. [1] Eventually, a standard "simplified" abstraction over k8s will emerge.…

I was about to, but seems like you answered the question yourself through that footnote.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people ought to do a side by side comparison of a new user learning to K8S v AWS v GCP before claiming Kubernetes adds more complexity than it returns in benefits. Remember the first time you saw the AWS console? And the last time?

Hmm really? My experience is that, with k8s I end up learning all the complexities of k8s in addition to AWS. Besides, personally I find AWS console much easier to understand. I don't get why people hate it.

AWS console is very carefully designed to let you create traps that result in spending huge buckets of money if you're not paying attention.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#234
post #199
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good answer. I'll add that as soon as you need to do something slightly more complex, without something like k8s you aren't going to be happy with your life. With k8s, it's almost a 1 liner. For example, adding a load balancer or a network volume or nginx or an SSL cert or auto scaling or...or...or...

Come on. What? Setting up a load balancer or nginx is considered complex now?

> What? Setting up a load balancer or nginx is considered complex now?

It's not complex to set up a load balancer in a given specific environment. But it's another kind of ask to say "set up a load balancer, but also make it so that the load balancer also exists in future dev environments that can be auto-set-up and auto-teared-down. And also make it so that load balancer will work on dev laptops, AWS, Azure, google, our private integration test cluster on site, and on our locally-hosted training environment, with the same configuration script." All of these things can be done in k8s, and basically are by default when you add your load balancer in k8s. They can be done other ways, too, or just ignored and not done, also. But k8s offers a standardized way to approach these kinds of things.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#235
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Might as well rent bare-metal servers In light of this statement, what do you make of the fact that billions of dollars are spent on EC2? And of the people who spend that money?

Outdated. We were further ahead in the abstraction ladder with PaaS, and honestly most apps could run perfectly fine in Beanstalk/App Engine/Cloud Foundry/Heroku. But then the devs demand Jenkins, Artifactory and MongoDB, and instead of using cloud-provider alternatives you're back to defining VPCs and autoscaling groups.

Thats a whole lot of dangerous vendor lock in you've just listed there.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#236

It makes a bit more sense if you see Kubernetes as the new Linux: a common foundation that the industry agrees on, and that you can build other abstractions on top of. In particular Kubernetes is the Linux Kernel, while we are in the early days of discovering what the "Linux distro" equivalent is, which will make it much more friendly / usable to a wider audience

This is exactly how we see it at my company.

Likewise, Linux is also a confusing mess of different parts and nonsensical abstractions when you first approach it. It does take some time to understand how to use it, and in particular how to do effective troubleshooting when things aren't working the way you expect.

But I 100% agree--I think it's the new Linux. In 5-10 years, it'll be the "go to", if not sooner.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#237

It's not because of the networking stack. I've yet to meet anyone who can easily explain how the CNI, services, ingresses and pod network spaces all work together. Everything is so interlinked and complicated that you need to understand vast swathes of kubernetes before you can attach any sort of complexity to the networking side. I contrast that to it's scheduling and resourcing components which are relatively easy…

Assuming that like us, you spend the last 10 - 12 years deploying IPv6 and currently running servers on IPv6 only networks, the Kubernetes/Docker network stack is just plain broken. It can be done, but you need to start thinking about stuff like BGP. Kubernetes should have been IPv6 only, with optional IPv4 ingress controllers.

+1000. Came here to rant, I'll just say "this"

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#238
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Containers are the big difference. Kubernetes is one way to deploy containers. Configuration systems like Ansible/Salt/Puppet/Chef/etc are another way to deploy containers. Kubernetes also makes it possible to dynamically scale your workload. But so does Auto Scaling Groups (AWS terminology) and GCP/Azure equivalents. The reality is that 99% of users don't actually need Kubernetes. It introduces a huge amount of comp…

>In fact, Kubernetes is a very dangerous chainsaw that most people are using to whittle in their laps. So many people miss this. k8s is a very complex system and the talent it takes to manage it well, rare. Extremely rare.

At some point I think I will setup an email account so I can offer to interview those downvoters

1st Question : Define k8s network, in detail, with all of the services and a set of services

IF you make it out of that one and the follow ups we can move on to the rest

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#239
post #7

To draw anecdotally from my own experiences, its for two reasons: 1. It's simple to get started with, but complex enough to tweak to your needs in respect to simplicity of deployment, scaling and resource definition. 2. It's appealingly cloud-agnostic just at the time where multiple cloud providers are all becoming viable and competitive. I think it's more #2 and #1; as always, timing is everything.

Yeah, I think people are overthinking it. The real reason is that if you do a superficial investigation you will quickly come back with the impression that k8s is near universally supported across cloud vendors and gives an appearance of providing a portable solution where otherwise the only alternative would be vendor lock-in. It makes it a no-brainer for anybody starting out with a new cloud deployment.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you view all the VMs in a project across the globe at the same time? Do you need to manage keys when ssh'n into a VM? Do you know what the purpose of all the products are? If you don't know one, are you able to at least have an idea what it's for without going to documentation? The have also directly opposed many efforts for Kubernetes, even to their own customers, until they realized they couldn't win. Only t…

Of course everyone's experience is different, but in my case... > How do you view all the VMs in a project across the globe at the same time? I'm not sure what it's got to do with k8s? I can't see jobs that belong to different k8s clusters at the same time, either. > Do you need to manage keys when ssh'n into a VM? Well, in k8s everybody who has access to the cluster can "ssh" into each pod as root and do whatever th…

Beleive they were referring to AWS not k8
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