‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’ • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#31

Post by ownagefool » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:51 AM UTC

newaccoutnas wrote: post #6

I'm not really following, perhaps it's too early here. AWS is a cloud provider, Kubernetes is container orchestration software. Here's a crazy thing, we do K8S on AWS.

Even more crazy, you can put Linux on Windows!

If you take a step away from the spiral that is AWS PaaS / SaaS services, k8s isn't that dissimilar to EC2, VPC, EBS, and IAM and thus a lot of the same arguments around lock-in apply.

This will become more obvious as people put windows VMs on k8s because it's there and they can.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#32

Post by brtknr » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:53 AM UTC

Drawing comparison between OpenStack and K8s is also invalid IMO... they operate at different levels of abstraction. You can use K8s with OpenStack as a cloud provider as with any other cloud provider. K8s is intended to abstract away the infrastructure that lies underneath and give you a consistent way to deploy services across different cloud providers.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#33

Post by srouhaewaehy » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:53 AM UTC

Which of the two is Linux? It's more like Windows vs Java.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#34

Post by simula67 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:54 AM UTC

newaccoutnas wrote: post #6

I'm not really following, perhaps it's too early here. AWS is a cloud provider, Kubernetes is container orchestration software. Here's a crazy thing, we do K8S on AWS.

I think the comparison that the author makes is that AWS and Kubernetes are both platforms that you code your apps to, just like Windows and Linux

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#35

Post by Blackstone4 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:55 AM UTC

In terms of the comparison AWS vs. K8... are we not talking a much larger stack to replace AWS? i.e. VMware/OpenStack + K8 + Docker...Maybe this is what the author was implying?

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#36

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

zwischenzug wrote: post #7

whoisjuan wrote: post #2

I disagree. The only reason for AWS slow adoption of Kubernetes was because they couldn't find a strong use-case within their customer base. Customers knew they wanted to use it, but they really didn't know how or why it would be better than using other type of container architecture. AWS doesn't build services for customers to toy around. Every new service is a significant investment so the data and the use cases ne…

Author here. This is absolutely not true. I worked for an AWS customer that wanted to use it and had a crystal clear strategy for why. The idea that AWS didn't have a business case for EKS is _laughable_. Also laughable is the idea that K8s didn't have enough traction to be worth the investment. EKS was a bolt from the blue - we'd been quietly told by senior staff that ECS would be moved to a K8s API (which we may ha…

Because you “worked for an AWS customer” that wanted it is not a valid reason for why AWS should invest in the service.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#37

Post by tanilama » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:04 AM UTC

K8s is not an AWS comparison, at least not a proper one.

K8s is software, but AWS is software + hardware. Your K8s cluster likely would still be hosted on AWS/Azure/GCP.

K8s lives upon the cloud providers, they are not competitors.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#38

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:05 AM UTC

geezerjay wrote: post #13

Blackstone4 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is quite a cynical view. Amazon and other cloud providers want to attract and keep users by providing the best product possible. This may come in different forms so some people want easy-to-setup databases (AWS RDS) others want auth (IAM) handled for them, others scalability (Appengine) or maybe email (SES). In order to create these services and to make life easier for those who want them, it may req…

> They would love some lock-in but it is not at the forefront of their minds when creating a service. I really find that assertion hard to believe. AWS is notoriously expensive and oddly enough its added value comes in the form of proprietary technologies which require non-transferable tech skills. The lock-in overload goes to the extreme of leading technicians to specialize exclusively in AWS services which leads to…

The most expensive parts of AWS for us are:

RDS - hosted non proprietary databases.

EC2 - Standard VM hosting

Redshift - a proprietary OLAP database that uses standard Postgres drivers

S3 - object storage. But there are so many S3 API compatible storage providers, there is little “lock-in”

But the fact is that lock-in is overrated. Your CTO is statistically as likely to move their entire infrastructure just because a few engineers promised it would be “seamless” as your DBA is going to move away from their Oracle installation because developers “used the Repository Pattern to abstract database access”.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#39

Post by jpgvm » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:05 AM UTC

In my experience AWS is the huge waste of time. I spent years on and off effectively building poor implementations of k8s to make AWS digestible to developers. If you work in "IT" rather than infrastructure for a large software company you might not have experienced this as internal IT is more static and easy to run on AWS/VMWare/whatever.

For me k8s finally signals moving beyond that problem and onto more interesting things as it "solves" that. Devs understand it "well enough" or can copy/paste from another project and get going without hand holding.

People that don't understand the value of the single unified API vs the hodge podge of AWS garbage (don't even mention CloudFormation) are completely missing the point. Sure it's no better for running your "IT" workloads, but that isn't what it's for.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#40

Post by paulftw » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:05 AM UTC

Software Engineer's fallacy: if all you have is software/programming skills you start to look for an open source linux based solution to holding wooden boards in place, one that doesn't vendor lock you into the iron ore.

With Windows vs Linux the premise was you install absolutely free software on a computer you already own and you end up with a superior computing and programming environment.

With k8s - you switched to it, now what? You have to buy server hardware, rent or build a room, run wires for electricity and broadband, build cooling, physical security, etc etc etc. You will stop paying hourly rate to Amazon, but all the upfront and recurring costs will chew into that saving and you'll question whether it was worth the drill. Foremost, it will all take days and weeks, but with AWS it takes intolerable 20 minutes to spin up the k8s control plane (did I remember the term right?)

Even if you do all of that and blog about your great success, what's your plan for when it goes viral and visitors flow in to leave accolades on your visionary move?

With AWS, you could just spin up more servers to deal with extra traffic. With your own datacenter, you'd have to order new servers, perhaps from Amazon's same day delivery...