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Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

carlosrdrz.es

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Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#31

Post by de_watcher »

jypepin wrote: post #5

I totally agree with this article. I'm giving a point of a view of a pure developer who knows nothing about DevOps things and managing servers. I kind of know what NGINX is and barely know how to configure something like systemd. I recently setup a digital ocean droplet and setup my blog there to actually understand how it works. It was great because I learned a ton and feel in control. Pretty simple setup - single d…

> giving a point of a view of a pure developer

Kubernetes really looks like designed by the software developers for the software developers: dump all configs of your services in one place, imagine that they run on the network. The uninteresting parts of the job (like managing nodes and ingress, fixing internal overlay network and DNS, adding services for centralized logging) aren't mixed with the actual services. Obviously, the package management is solved by using containers (essentially OS images) as the package format.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#32

Post by mockingbirdy »

vbsteven wrote: post #8

I've been thinking about setting up a small Kubernetes cluster for hosting some smaller client projects (read websites, shopping carts, API's, admin panels). My current setup uses a couple of Hetzner dedicated machines and services are deployed with ansible playbooks. The playbooks install and configure nginx, install the right version of ruby/java/php/postgres, configure and start systemd services. These playbooks e…

I will just link to my recommendation of CaptainDuckDuck:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18128575

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#33

Post by tilolebo »

carlosrdrz wrote: post #9
reilly3000 wrote: post #3

Warning to those who think Fargate is green pastures: it has its own learning curve. Also, it costs about ~1.8-2.5X the price of standard EC2 for the convenience. Don't waste your money on it for long-running containers that will rarely need to scale.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I wrote about Fargate because I like the idea of having a service that manages both masters AND workers and where you only need to care about the API, but didn't really try it yet. That was my impression as well, though. Even the use cases mentioned in the pricing site are just containers running for a few hours a day, and not long-running services like servers.

The smallest fargate container in us-east-1 will cost you USD 13 per month if you never shut it down.

Avoid using a load balancer as they are quite pricey (although it will allow you to create and use auto-managed SSL certificates for free.)

Of course you will also pay for egress traffic.

The nicest part of Fargate is that:

* you can define your whole cluster using a docker-compose like format.

* you can manage your cluster using the ECS CLI. No extra tool needed.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#34

Post by codegladiator »

Frankly the article is filled with FUD and the author justifies everything with "i think/what if/my way is fine for me".

You don't need to run a new cluster for every project. You can deploy multiple projects in a single cluster. I was running close to 5 different projects in a single cluster, backed by about 3-6 machines (machines added/removed on demand).

Kubernetes is basically like your own heroku. You can create namespaces for your projects. No scripts. You can deduce everything (how is a service deployed, whats the config, whats the arch) from the config files (yml)

> Is a single Nginx virtual host more complex or expensive than deploying a Nginx daemon set and virtual host in Kubernetes? I don't think so.

Yes it is. I wonder if the author has actually tried setting this themselves. I do realise i had similar opinions before I had worked with kubernetes, but after working with it, I cannot recommend it enough.

> When you do a change in your Kubernetes cluster in 6 months, will you remember all the information you have today?

Yes, why does the author think otherwise ? Or if this is a real argument why does the author think their "ansible" setup would be at the top of the head. I had one instance where I had to bring a project back up on prod (it was a collection of 4 services + 2 databases not including the LB) after 6-8 months of keeping it "down". Guess what, I just scaled the instances from 0 to 3, ssl is back, all services are back, everything is up and running.

This is not to say you wont have issues, I had plenty during the time i started trying it out. There is a learning curve and please do try out the ecosystem multiple times before thinking of using it in production.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#35

Post by striking »

wheresvic1 wrote: post #6

Totally agree with the author, for my side projects in Node.js, I use the following: - pm2 for uptime (pm2 itself is setup as a systemd serivce, it's really simple to do and pm2 can install itself as a systemd service) - I create and tag a release using git - on the production server, I have a little script that fetches the latest tag, wipes and does a fresh npm install and pm2 restart. - nginx virtual host with ssl…

Drone CI could make this whole process automated and preserve your ability to inspect the logs.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#36

Post by pstadler »

> Do you want to do all of this because you think is fun? Or because you want to learn the technology? or just because? Please, be my guest! [...]

Kubernetes is likely here to stay. If you're interested in running a cluster to undestand what the hype is all about and to learn something new, you should do it. Also, ignore everybody telling you that this platform wasn't meant for that.

Complexity is a weak argument. Once your cluster is running you just write a couple of manifests to deploy a project, versus: ssh into machine; useradd; mkdir; git clone; add virtual host to nginx; remember how certbot works; apt install whatever; systemctl enable whatever; pm2 start whatever.yml; auto-start project on reboot; configure logrotate; etc. Can this be automated? Sure, but I'd rather automate my cluster provisioning.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#37

Post by carlosrdrz »

solatic wrote: post #21

Oh man, the original article went way over the author's head. The point of the original article was that even though Kubernetes is primarily useful for tackling the challenges involved with running many workloads at enterprise scale, it can also be used to run small hobbyist workloads at a price point acceptable for hobbyist projects. Does that mean that Kubernetes should now be used for all hobbyist projects? No. If…

I do agree with you, but I don't think I really missed the point of the original article. From the original article: > However popular wisdom would suggest that Kubernetes is an overly complex piece of technology only really suitable for very large clusters of machines; that it carries a large operational burden and that therefore using it for anything less than dozens of machines is overkill. I think that's probably wrong.

I don't think that is wrong. I do think it is probably overkill, and IMO it does introduce operational burden and complexity. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, though, if you're interested in exploring the technology, for example.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#38

Post by parasubvert »

jypepin wrote: post #5

I totally agree with this article. I'm giving a point of a view of a pure developer who knows nothing about DevOps things and managing servers. I kind of know what NGINX is and barely know how to configure something like systemd. I recently setup a digital ocean droplet and setup my blog there to actually understand how it works. It was great because I learned a ton and feel in control. Pretty simple setup - single d…

There’s been a bit of a full circle going on in the industry. PaaS like Heroku were rejected by many because they couldn’t tinker inside the box. Docker and Kubernetes changes that, and there will be new Heroku-like experiences built on them.

But for now we are in this weird mode where the Kubernetes momentum is eclipsing even Docker, even though raw K8s reminds me of Linux in the Slackware days. there is so much FOMO, people don’t consider Heroku or anything off the Kubernetes wagon, except maybe AWS Lambda.

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#39

Post by yebyen »

Annatar wrote: post #24

"Oh man, the original article went way over the author's head." No, the author of the Kubernetes article completely, so utterly missed the point that it's not even funny: none of those Kubernetes complications are necessary if one runs SmartOS and optionally, as a bonus, Triton. Since doing something the harder and more complicated way for the same effect is irrational, which presumably the author of the Kubernetes a…

While that's great, and I thought about plugging my own containers project here too, to get it some exposure and possibly help someone (we're trying to help people get on the train, and that's commendable, I didn't downvote you) now you've gone from something bespoke to something basically singular, where Kubernetes is a leading industry standard with the weight of at least[1] 77 vendors who have sought and achieved conformance[2] with their own distributions of Kubernetes.

I haven't heard of Joyent or SmartOS in years! I am super surprised to hear of anyone recommending it today as a competitor to Kubernetes, and I have no facts or deep understanding of that platform so I won't belabor you with an argument about how Kubernetes is better. (I can't say if it is or isn't.) It's just not in the same ballpark. I'm glad it works for you. I'm especially glad to hear about another option (that we could potentially replace our bespoke deployments with), because the more of these things I know about, the louder I can clamor to upper management about the fact that we're not using any of these technologies yet, and we should be (to sleep through the night!)

I learned about Kubernetes through Deis Workflow. It took years to understand Kubernetes from end-to-end, and I was already a container veteran when Deis moved to k8s. I resisted! I caved. I came over, now I have years of experience with Kubernetes, and I can't say I'd recommend anything else. "Those complications" are all very hard to get over, but then ... you get over them! And largely don't have to do that again.

If you are on Kubernetes, then you are not locked in to any cloud provider (unless you have opted into another technology that made you locked in.) I can't say the same for Triton.

For the purposes of disclosure, I am a member of Team Hephy, the open source Deis Workflow fork. (Deis Workflow is EOL and Hephy is the continuation.) Workflow is how I learned Kubernetes, and I would still recommend it highly to anyone else that wants to learn Kubernetes. But I will not kid anyone into thinking it's going to happen overnight. (With Workflow though, you can absolutely start using it productively in about an hour.)[3]

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LxSqBzjOxfGx3cmtZ4Eb...

[2]: https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/

[3]: https://web.teamhephy.com or https://blog.teamhephy.info/#install

Re: Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks

#40

Post by vorpalhex »

pstadler wrote: post #36

> Do you want to do all of this because you think is fun? Or because you want to learn the technology? or just because? Please, be my guest! [...] Kubernetes is likely here to stay. If you're interested in running a cluster to undestand what the hype is all about and to learn something new, you should do it. Also, ignore everybody telling you that this platform wasn't meant for that. Complexity is a weak argument. On…

> Complexity is a weak argument

I see you've never tried to upgrade a running kubernetes cluster or been in an on call schedule for one. It's a new technology that is still maturing but it has a lot of moving parts all of which require a fair bit of understanding and which change on a regular basis.

Hell, just a few months ago the ACM agent totally got rewritten and now you have a choice between alpha software or a deprecated project!

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