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Do you really need Kubernetes?

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Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#31

Post by zer00eyz »

ceejayoz wrote: post #8
zer00eyz wrote: post #2

There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…

> Not having hardware is someone else's profit. But it's also someone else's economies of scale. The chances of me getting datacenter space, hardware, bandwidth, and expert 24/7 staffing at the same volume discounts they do is... slim. Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.

>> Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.

How small... ovh, hetzener are both a thing and cheap as chips if your VPS sized. You just have to plan ahead for what you're doing and how you want to scale it. It requires a bit more upfront thought... but if your on a budget (personal project scale) knowing that you have a FIXED COST is pretty good for sleeping easy at night.

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#32

Post by Nextgrid »

nova22033 wrote: post #13
zer00eyz wrote: post #2

There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…

Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. I'm expected to write a service like s3?

Depends on S3's role in your application. If you actually need unlimited, worldwide-replicated object storage with nearly limitless bandwidth, sure, use S3 and pay for it.

Do you just need a place to stash files so your multiple application servers can read them? An NFS export over a private network can very well be all you need, and you can have that file server back itself up to S3/etc at regular intervals.

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#33

Post by beachy »

alex_lav wrote: post #7
vrnvu wrote: post #3

I'd say 99% of companies using Kubernetes can't really explain why they chose it over Nomad.

The entire reason is popularity/marketshare, and that's a really valid reason to choose tech like this.

Makes sense. And with LLMs training on what is publicly available, this becomes self-fulfilling, because you'll get better answers from AI about what is popular - not what is technically superior.

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#34

Post by beeeeerp »

zer00eyz wrote: post #2

There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…

The biggest thing “the cloud” had gotten me is that I no longer have to call a sales rep and wait a week if I need a server. Yes this is a process problem, but for whatever reason it seems to stop being a problem (as much) with companies moving to the cloud. I have seen this 3+ times now. As an engineer, I’d much rather move off prem than fix bad management.

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#35

Post by stekern »

doctor_eval wrote: post #23

I’m sceptical of this article. I’m an indy dev using K8s at vultr (VKS) and it’s absolutely simplified my life. The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s, but if I do that, I now have to manage an entire operating system. I have to make sure the OS is up to date, and balance all the nuances this entails, especially balancing downtimes, and recovery from upgrades. Major OS upgrades are hard, and pretty much g…

(Author here)

The main focus of the post is to highlight some of the long-term risks and consequences of standardizing around Kubernetes in an org. If you've done a proper evaluation, and still think Kubernetes makes sense for you, then it's probably a sound decision. But I think many skip the evaluation step or do it hastily. The post is more targeted towards organizations with at least a handful of employees. What works for an indy dev does not necessarily scale and work for SMBs or larger orgs - those are very different contexts.

> The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s

Not quite. I suggest strongly considering using managed services when it makes sense for your organization. The equivalent of k8s in terms of managed services would be Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) as the control plane, perhaps with AWS Fargate as the compute runtime.

(I wouldn't really call EC2 a managed service - it's more in the territory of Infrastructure as a Service)

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#36

Post by zer00eyz »

romanhn wrote: post #19
zer00eyz wrote: post #2

There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…

I fully agree with your last paragraph, but not sure what it has to do with cloud infrastructure specifically. AWS also leverages huge economies of scale into profit, it's not like you're going to realize equivalent margins by running your own little server in a colo somewhere. You certainly won't realize equivalent availability, scalability, security, support ecosystem, etc with it either. Cloud infra can make a lot…

>> it's not like you're going to realize equivalent margins by running your own little server in a colo somewhere

At this scale ovh, hetzner are the solutions. If your that small fixed fee pricing is a HUGE win.

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#37

Post by jauntywundrkind »

There's some legit notions here, but overwhelmingly it uses insinuation & suggestion to sow Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.

> Despite its portability, Kubernetes also introduces a form of lock-in – not to a specific vendor, but to a paradigm that may have implications on your architecture and organizational structure. It can lead to tunnel vision where all solutions are made to fit into Kubernetes instead of using the right tool for the job.

This seems a bit absurd on a number of fronts. It doesn't shape architecture that much, in my view; it runs your stuff. Leading to tunnel vision, preventing the right tool for the job? That doesn't seem to be a particularly real issue; most big services have some kind of Kubernetes operator that seems to work just fine.

Kubernetes seems to do a pretty fine job of exposing platform, in a flexible and consistent fashion. If it was highly opinionated or specific, it probably wouldn't have gotten where it is.

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#38

Post by r14c »

zer00eyz wrote: post #2

There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…

Fully agree. Cloud can be an easy way to get started since you don't have to pay as much up front, and even you need extremely elastic scaling you'll save a fortune in the long term by investing in at least some on-prem hardware to handle the off-peak workloads. If you have predictable stable loading, you can save even more!

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#39

Post by autoexecbat »

vrnvu wrote: post #3

I'd say 99% of companies using Kubernetes can't really explain why they chose it over Nomad.

It's easy. When I look at resumes that come in, a sea of people listing experience with k8s and rarely a mention of nomad.

When your team has familiarity with something, it's a bit harder to suggest an alternative unless it's quite a lot better

Re: Do you really need Kubernetes?

#40

Post by silverquiet »

beeeeerp wrote: post #34
zer00eyz wrote: post #2

There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Lea…

The biggest thing “the cloud” had gotten me is that I no longer have to call a sales rep and wait a week if I need a server. Yes this is a process problem, but for whatever reason it seems to stop being a problem (as much) with companies moving to the cloud. I have seen this 3+ times now. As an engineer, I’d much rather move off prem than fix bad management.

If you mean buying an actual server I order on menu regularly. If you mean a dedicated server in a DC then there are plenty of providers who can auto provision a bare metal instance for you. That was possible before AWS even opened up to public sales.
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