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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#271

Post by dancemethis »

tristor wrote: post #118

The simple answer is that Kubernetes isn't really any of the things it's been described as. What it /is/, though, is an operating system for the Cloud. It's a set of universal abstraction layers that can sit on top of and work with any IaaS provider and allows you to build and deploy applications using infrastructure-as-code concepts through a standardized and approachable API. Most companies who were late on the Clo…

"Approachable"

The buzzword mumbo-jumbo on the first paragraph alone (which isn't really even your fault or anything, just the bogus pomp inherent to k8s as a whole) is already a scarecrow to anyone that "wasn't born with the knowledge", really.

It is pretty hard to get used to it. Brushing it away won't make it approachable.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#272

Post by biggestlou »

Kubernetes got popular because it was the first system that came along that provided a CRUD API for resources of all kinds, including custom resources (CRDs), and was immediately compatible with public artifact hubs like DockerHub and Google Container Registry. The second one is the real kicker here, and I think is why Kubernetes "won" and Mesos et al did not. With Mesos et al you had to set up your own artifact storage. As powerful as Mesos was, there was no MesosHub.

Longer term, I think the contribution of Kubernetes will be getting us used to a resource/API-driven approach to infrastructure that abstracts away cloud providers, hardware, etc. But it will probably be superseded in the coming years by something that honors similar API "contracts." Probably written in Rust troll

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#273

Post by battery_cowboy »

happytoexplain wrote: post #160
geggam wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it breaks.

No, even then it's still better. A broken declarative model is better than a broken script.

An sh script is a series of things that almost any developer who uses Linux can understand: command line statements. We use them all the time. Suppose the complicated declarative model you've made doesn't work one day and the person who originally wrote it is gone? Even if you have someone to debug it who knows the k8s languages: usually you can't just use the yml files alone, you need terraform or something, plus maybe some other services and "sidecar" containers that do other things for you. With a sh script, you just have the script with a bunch of commands that you can understand and look up easily, in a linear order, to figure out the problem. You might not understand every command, but you can run each one until you get to the error, then focus in on that area. With k8s, you need to figure out a huge series of intermixed deps and networks and services just to start, then find the one that is failing (if that is the one failing and it's not just being masked by another failed service that you didn't know about).

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#274

Post by kasey_junk »

silviogutierrez wrote: post #4

For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…

Conversely I think the trend of writing infrastructure as yaml may be the worst part of modern ops. It’s really hard to think of a worse language for this.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#275

Post by hnarayanan »

bulldoa wrote: post #192
ithkuil wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> setting it up kind of feels like I'm trying to earn a PhD thesis. The kind of people who has to both set the cluster up and keep it up and also has to develop the application and deploy it and keep it up etc is not the target audience. K8s shines when the roles of managing the cluster and running workloads on it are separated. It defines a good contract between infrastructure and workload. It lets different people…

Do you have a recommended tutorial for engineer with backend background to setup a simple k8 infra in ec2, I am interested in understanding devops role better

https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#276

Post by bg24 »

- There are big names behind it. - It will replace VM orchestration platforms. - Fear of missing out.

Jokes aside, when you've lots of teams, all working on small pieces of a large product and shipping on their own, iterating fast... you need a platform and ecosystem on top to meet their requirements. As you reach planet-scale, you need to NOT let your cost grow exponentially. Hence it is popular.

What if you're not planet-scale? Well, it will still help (attract talent, design for scale, better ecosystem etc.). Hence it is popular.

If you're building a business however, focus on business and time-to-market, definitely not the infra, i.e. kubernetes.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#277

Post by foobar_ »

The arguments used to consistently market software

1. It's portable

2. It's fast

3. It's declarative

4. It's fun / productive / easy

5. It's safe / automatic

6. It's an integrated framework

The opposites are also used to detract competitors.

The idea of k8 is that it will be portable to all hosting providers and linux distributions as opposed to developing shell scripts for Red Hat, especially multiple versions. I don't think it's easy or fun or fast.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#278

Post by ransom1538 »

tristor wrote: post #118

The simple answer is that Kubernetes isn't really any of the things it's been described as. What it /is/, though, is an operating system for the Cloud. It's a set of universal abstraction layers that can sit on top of and work with any IaaS provider and allows you to build and deploy applications using infrastructure-as-code concepts through a standardized and approachable API. Most companies who were late on the Clo…

Just running docker-compose on load balanced machines is pretty close to having all k8s features (that would give you an endpoint, scaling, running pods[containers],heartbeats and nodes[vms]). If you run Kubernetes on GCP you will see it's just a wrapper of GCP vms, load balancers, instance groups and disks. EG: GCP k8's autoscaling for the nodes isn't any better than just simple GCP load balancers and instance groups (it literally is the same thing). k8's best feature (only?): specify yaml files to declare the setup. That is great! But, you make edits to this 4 times a year - that is a ton of complexity for those 4 git commits.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#279

Post by jonahbenton »

yalogin wrote: post #222

Google created it but did they get any benefit from it? Did it help in getting any business for GCP?

Two different questions.

To the first- yes, enormously so. If you know your history, it is the Linux to the Microsoft that is AWS- except backed by a business. (Google is maybe RedHat in that story, but the analogy is more inaccurate than accurate).

To the second, not really. GCP is mostly turning into an ML play.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#280

Post by courtf »

I honestly couldn't tell you.

What I can tell you, is that the unbelievable bloat in the complexity of our systems is going to bite us in the ass. I'll never forget when I joined a hip fintech company, and the director of eng told us in orientation that we should think of their cloud of services as a thousand points of light, out in space. I knew my days were numbered at exactly that moment. This company had 200k unique users, and they were spending a million dollars a month on CRUD. Granted, banking is its own beast, but I had just come from a company of 10 people serving 3 million daily users 10k requests a second for images drawn on the fly by GPUs. Our hosting costs never exceeded 20k per month, and the vast majority of that was cloudflare.

Deploying meant compiling a static binary and copying it to the 4-6 hardware servers we ran in a couple racks, one rack on each side of the continent. We were drunk by 11am most of the time.

Today, it's apparently much more impressive if you need to have a team of earnest, bright-eyed Stanford grads constantly tweaking and fiddling with 100 knobs in order to keep systems running. Enter kubernetes.

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