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Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

theregister.com

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Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

#31

Post by throwawayboise »

ferdowsi wrote: post #4
gnivol wrote: post #3

This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up. Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"

From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…

My only experience with k8s is trying to run it in-house on a cluster of servers. I could never get it to work. Ansible makes much more sense to me.

Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

#32

Post by sleepybrett »

gizdan wrote: post #20
ferdowsi wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…

I have been on both sides of the stick. At a previous place we set up a cluster on AWS. This was before EKS. We started out with kops initially but later used the generated CFN yaml. It was not an easy feat. There was a lot of gotchas, moving pieces and much more. All of these moving pieces had their own gotchas. Plus lots of competition in the area with not a lot of comparisons since it was early days. Many things w…

I'll back up your anecdote. We had a lot of teams fretting about how long it would take to utilize kubernetes. After a short sit down with one of the kubernetes ops team members (even juniors) they were up in running and thanking us for all the time they would save managing ec2 patching etc.

Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

#33

Post by wffurr »

reedciccio wrote: post #6
moksly wrote: post #2

I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it. The unpredictability of cost is actually t…

Renting the hardware is not necessarily a cost-saving measure though: how much of the compute/storage capacity you have is sitting idle in your datacenter? That's the whole point of finops: you need to have full visibility into the usage of your infrastructure so you can optimize the spend.

OP didn't say anything about cost saving but rather predictability.

Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

#34

Post by twalla »

sleepybrett wrote: post #28
moksly wrote: post #2

I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it. The unpredictability of cost is actually t…

When we pushed a bunch of teams at a large retailer from ec2 to kubernetes in ec2 (not eks) we reduced overall cloud spend by ~30%. It's only unpredictable and unquantifiable if you don't look at it. Is the problem that they don't have the right tools to look at it yet?

The flip side of this is I was able to reduce an employers cloud spend by 80 percent by just _fixing_ the mistakes they made when migrating to kubernetes. We were still on k8s afterwards, its just that the first pass made a bunch naive assumptions and poor optimizations.

Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

#35

Post by twalla »

ferdowsi wrote: post #4
gnivol wrote: post #3

This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up. Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"

From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…

From the SRE side: if you need bespoke fancy shit (we write a lot of operators to remove toil from running things we'd typically do with ansible/manually), the kubernetes API, CRDs and the operator/controller pattern are a joy to develop against for the most part.

Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

#36

Post by bogota »

moksly wrote: post #2

I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it. The unpredictability of cost is actually t…

Unfortunately AWS is the new oracle. No one ever gets in trouble for picking it and its a great way to make it look like you as a high up exec provide value. Look how fast we are iterating now with my decision. It almost always ends in a mess of unmaintainable unthought out services that someone else has to come and clean up or move to the next proprietary service.

The last 5 years for me has been soul crushing as someone who actually enjoys managing datacenters. We have seen time and time again having your own DC leads to much better visibility and control on spending as well as lower cost. Not to mention the huge advantage when negotiating with cloud vendors if you are a mid size or up company.

So time and time again i have had to transition out of environments you can reason about into AWS and become a glorified support engineer but i guess thats what companies need now days. Someone who will read docs the other engineers dont want to and troubleshoot all the issues because AWS is so easy.

Im glad I got to learn how the “cloud” works though as i likely never would have been drawn to infra and programming in this day and age.

Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

#39

Post by frompdx »

The headline seems a bit hyperbolic after reading the article. The bar chart has the caption Accurate prediction of Kubernetes costs is a challenge. However, the chart shows that one in five respondents represented in the data don't bother to predict their costs at all. Over half can predict within 10%, which seems fairly reasonable even if there is room for improvement. That leaves the remaining 20% who really are struggling to accurately predict their costs with better accuracy than 25%.

The trouble with all of this is that it doesn't really account for how the respondents use Kubernetes. What type of workloads are they running and how variable are those workloads? Would the organizations struggling to predict costs still struggle using another solution if their workloads are highly variable? Are they trading fixed costs for scalability in the face of those variable workloads? It's certainly possible to set upper bounds to autoscaling and to run fixed sized workloads in Kubernetes.

Perhaps the best takeaway from the article is that there is an opportunity to develop better cost management tools or offer consulting services in this domain. I know there are a few companies out there hoping to offer services in this space already.

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