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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my pubkeys are below, send me an ip address and port to an ssh server https://github.com/cameronnemo.keys

Anyone can ssh into a server and apt-get haproxy and tweak the configuration and get it "working" where the definition of working is accepting and routing traffic. But that's just a hobby setup. When people say setting up a load balancer is complex they are talking about professional setups, not a one off software install on a single server.

So give me a (possibly private) ASN, a couple bgp peers, and the frrouting suite. ACME is not difficult either.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#252

Before K8S, to run a service you need: - Setup VM: and their dependencies, tool chain. If you use thing like package that has native component such as image processing you event need to setup some compiler on the VM - Deployment process - Load balancer - Systemd unit to auto restart it. Set memory limit etc. All of that is done in K8S. As long as you ship a Dockerfile, you're done.

I feel like you're simplifying things unnecessarily, all of the things you mentioned you still configure, except the configuration is now in YAML.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#253
post #234
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Some of those requirements are far-fetched. Multiple cloud environments AND on-prem?

Ansible and Vagrant are not perfect, but I think they are far simpler than a single node k8s instance, and more representative of an actual production environment.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#254

I get the feeling K8 is the modern PHP. Software that's easy to pick up and use without complete understanding and get something usable. Even if its not efficient and results in lots of technical debt. And like PHP, it will be criticised with the power of hind sight but will continue to be used and power vast swaths of the internet.

I don't think this is right. The reason I say that is because for the most part, teams new to k8s aren't building and managing their own clusters, they are using a managed solution. In that case, an application deployment only need be a few dozen lines of yaml. Most teams aren't really going to be building deep into k8s, and it shouldn't be hard to deploy your containers to some other managed solution.

Fair point, but then plenty of people were using hosted solutions for their naive PHP apps too. Managed solutions don't prevent poor/improper configuration in either case.

The managed hosts and/or their tools probably helped negate damage/resolve issues quicker. However I think that the idea that "all you need is a couple of dozen lines of yaml and a managed provider" is exactly why it's headed down a similar path.

For a real world examples just look at every improperly configured S3 bucket leaking data. Every private key accidentally posted to github from a careless 'git add -a'. Every API that doesn't properly check auth. None of these are within the purview of a managed hosts responsibility.

I'm not even against K8 in any of this. Just making the observation that - like PHP - it is empowering entire groups of people to do things they otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#255
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do a comparison? K8S runs on AWS and GCP. They have managed services for setting up one. If you know K8S as a developer, then you simply consume the cloud K8S cluster.

I think the point is that there are people that claim that k8s adds a ton of complexity to your environment. But if you compare k8s alone with managing your infrastructure using (non-k8s) AWS or GCP primitives, you'll find that the complexity is similar.

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#256
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K8s is great - if you are solving infrastructure at a certain scale. That scale being a Bank, Insurance Company or mature digital company. If you're not in that class then it's largely overkill/overcomplex IMO when you can simply use Terraform plus managed Docker host like ECS and attach cloud-native managed services. Again the cross cloud portability is a non starter, unless you're really at scale.

Hard disagree. What k8s really scales is the developer/operator power. Yes, it is complex, but pretty much all of it is necessary complexity. At small enough scale with enough time, you can dig a hole with your fingers - but a proper tool will do wonders to how much digging you can do. And a lot of that complexity is present even when you do everything the "old" way, it's just invisible toil. And a lot of the calculu…

We have a mature TF module library and can roll out complex, well configured infra in a matter of hours, reliably. That said it's platform specific.

Sure, managed service costs are certainly a thing, but to my point that only really start to become an issue at significant scale, assuming you're well configured.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#258

I get the feeling K8 is the modern PHP. Software that's easy to pick up and use without complete understanding and get something usable. Even if its not efficient and results in lots of technical debt. And like PHP, it will be criticised with the power of hind sight but will continue to be used and power vast swaths of the internet.

But languages are easy, there is the whole field of PL theory to draw from. If you're randomly throwing things together like Lerdorf was, there's a missed opportunity. But what is the universally regarded theory that k8s contradicts? I don't think there is one.

Give me 10 years and hind-sight and I'll have your answer.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#259

In this post it might only be an example, but I don't see anything, that necessitates the use of YAML. All of that could be put in a JSON file, which is far less complex. YAML should not even be needed for Kubernetes. Configuration should be representable in a purely declarative way, instead of making the YAML mess, with all kinds of references and stuff. Perhaps the configuration specification needs to be re-worked.…

You absolutely can use just JSON with Kubernetes and not YAML. The K8s backend services store configuration in JSON and the API protocols use JSON. There's even a K8s configuration management tool called Ksonnet that uses an extended, JSON-like language with full program-ability, instead of the template mess of Helm charts.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#260
I've been completely perplexed by how I might repeatably and reliably setup a single DigitalOcean (or similar) server.

I can't just blow away the instance, make a new one with their API, and run a bash script to set it up because I need to persist some sqlite databases between deploys.

Nix looks promising, but also seems to be a lot to learn. I think I'd rather focus on my app than learn a whole new language and ecosystem and way of thinking about dependencies.

I don't think my needs are insane here, I'm surprised there seems to be no infrastructure as code project for tiny infrastructures.

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