> This helps ops people because it allows them to think about infrastructure as abstract resources rather than as a collection of individual machines with specific designations. With k8s, individual machines become a homogenized resource that do not need specialized provisioning depending on the application they will host.
This is a very true statement. I'm looking at it with a bit of a different view as well: We're currently setup very classically. Ops maintains terraform, VMs, config management. Some developers have taken over some highlevel cluster management via the configuration management. This works very well.
As long as you're pushing 3 applications around. Onboarding an application into a config management solution can easily take 2 - 4 engineering weeks on the ops side. And the work will always be on the ops-side because that's where the required expertise of the configuration management lies, which is a hefty chunk of specialized knowledge. If you're looking at a ramp-up from 3 applications to 5, 8, 20, like in our case, that's ... ugly. In our case, that's actually planned, because we've been bought due to our experience in this context. Yey.
That's a huge investment if you look at time alone, it's like 80 engineering weeks at worst. That's a year of nothing else all of a sudden. A situation like that magnifies the operations team as a bottleneck even worse.
And that's IMO where the orchestration solutions and containers come in. Ops should provide build chains, the orchestration system and the internal consulting to (responsibly) hand off 80% of that work to developers who know their applications.
Orchestration systems like K8, Nomad or Mesos make this much, much easier than classical configuration management solutions. They come with a host of other issues, especially if you have to self-host like we do, no question. Persistence is a bitch, and security the devil. Sure.
But I have an entire engineering year already available to setup the right 20% for my 20 applications, and that will easily scale to another 40 - 100 applications as well with some management and care.
That's why we as the ops-team are actually pushing container orchestrations and possibly self-hosted FaaS at my current place.
Hm, guess that got a bit longer. You hit a nerve somewhat.
