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Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#311

Post by KaiserPro »

binarymax wrote: post #29

Kubernetes is a Google scale solution. Lots of teams said “hey if Google does it then it must be good!”…but forgot that they didn’t have the scale. It caught on so much that for whatever reason it’s now the horrendous default. I’ve worked on at least 3 consulting projects that incorporated K8s and it slowed everything down and took way too much time, and we got nothing in return - because those projects only needed s…

> Kubernetes is a Google scale solution

The problem is that its _not_ a google scale solution. Its something that _looks_ like a google scale solution, but is like a movie set compared to the real thing.

for example: https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg...

no more than 5k nodes.

Its extra ordinarily chatty at that scale, which means it;ll cost on inter-vpc traffic. I also strongly suspect that the whole thing is fragile at that size.

Having run a 36k node cluster in 2014, I know that K8s is just not designed for high scale high turnover vaguely complicated job graphs.

I get the allure, but in practice K8s is designed for a specific usecase, and most people don't have that usecase.

for most people you will want either ECS(its good enough, so long as you work around its fucking stupid service scheme) or something similar.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#312

Post by KaiserPro »

caymanjim wrote: post #14

The premise of your question is invalid. Have you ever tried setting up a Kubernetes cluster and deploying apps in it? Kubernetes doesn't save work, it adds work. In return, you get a lot of benefits, but it wasn't designed to reduce human work, nor was it designed to eliminate devops jobs. It was designed for scalability and availability more than anything. Most people using Kubernetes should be using something simp…

> It was designed for scalability and availability more than anything.

yet its really not great at the first, and I'm strongly suspicious about the latter claim. Its very simple to make boneheaded decisions about networking that makes thing fragile.

In terms of scale, you have a limit of 5k nodes. given how fucking chatty it is, it costs a lot to run loads of nodes.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#313

Post by devonkim »

esoterae wrote: post #303
devonkim wrote: post #301

Kubernetes in a sense is very similar to Linux back in the 2000s - it was nascent technology in a hot market that was still absolutely evolving. The difference now is that everyone knows the battle for the next tier of the platform is where people will be able to sell their value (look at RedHat selling to IBM for the saddled legacy of maintaining an OS as a tough growth proposition). For a while people thought that…

I have noticed a pattern that keeps popping up.. I've seen many orgs invoking docker/k8s simply as an abstraction layer to allow mapping of commit hashes in a repo to objects in deploy environments.

Depending upon the nature of the artifacts that's not necessarily the worst abstraction for modeling deployments (still think that deployments are the big elephant in the room that k8s doesn't solve either when it really needs to be better standardized as a profession IMO but that's another topic). ArgoCD arguably makes this work more intuitively and it's one of the most popular K8S ecosystem components today.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#314

Post by KaiserPro »

tapoxi wrote: post #15

From my experience, Kubernetes drastically reduces the number of DevOps people required. My current place has a team of 5, compared to a similarly sized, vmware-centric place I worked at a decade ago with a team of 14. But DevOps means many things because it's not clearly defined, which also makes it difficult to hire for. It's a "jack-of-all-trades" role that people somehow fell into and decided to do instead of mor…

> From my experience, Kubernetes drastically reduces the number of DevOps people required. My current place has a team of 5, compared to a similarly sized, vmware-centric place I worked at a decade ago with a team of 14.

Is that K8s, or that you've outsourced hosting, storage and stateful storage to cloud services?

I suspect that things are much easier to automate effectively, and the knowledge for automating things is much more common.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#315

Post by drdaeman »

jmillikin wrote: post #33
binarymax wrote: post #29

Kubernetes is a Google scale solution. Lots of teams said “hey if Google does it then it must be good!”…but forgot that they didn’t have the scale. It caught on so much that for whatever reason it’s now the horrendous default. I’ve worked on at least 3 consulting projects that incorporated K8s and it slowed everything down and took way too much time, and we got nothing in return - because those projects only needed s…

Kubernetes can't (currently) scale to Google sizes. It's designed for small- or medium-sized businesses, which might have 50,000 VMs or fewer. There are entire SaaS industries that could fit into a single Google/Facebook/Amazon datacenter.

I'm afraid this is why people pick Kubernetes. They believe small business needs those tens of thousands of VMs distributed across thousand of nodes and so on.

With some exceptions, I believe that's a few orders of magnitude above what a small business can run on. Nowadays people just start their day by drinking some K2l-aid and spinning up a "basic" 6-node cluster for a development prototype.

Maybe I'm wrong, of course.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#316

Post by wecloudpro »

If you use Kubernetes, you need custom operators and controllers in order to a have feature rich environment that can support your applications and support all CI/CD instrumentation.

Then, for designing, implementing and maintaining all these extra elements is why you need a devops guy. Also not mentioning how extremely fast things are moving in the cloud era.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#318

Post by kube-system »

jrx wrote: post #266
sgarland wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, do not manage deployments with imperative kubectl commands, I beg of you.

The question is: what tool to use? I'm a solo developer running a very small kube cluster for my hobby project. I very much wanted to have a declarative version controlled state of my cluster. Every time I try googling solutions I get flooded with some enterprise Saas offerings that do nothing I want. I managed my stateful sets/services for a while with terraform, but my experience was absolutely terrible and I have…

kubectl apply on a directory full of yaml works fairly well for small stuff. Check it into git and it's version controlled.

If you need something more flexible than that, try making your own helm chart. Helm will give you some text templating, pre and post hooks, some basic functions, and some versioning and rollback functionality.

You can start simple by just pasting in your existing k8s yaml, and then just pull out the pieces you need into variables in your values file. If you need to change an image version, then you just update the variable and `helm upgrade mychart ./mychart`

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#319

Post by js4ever »

wecloudpro wrote: post #316

If you use Kubernetes, you need custom operators and controllers in order to a have feature rich environment that can support your applications and support all CI/CD instrumentation. Then, for designing, implementing and maintaining all these extra elements is why you need a devops guy. Also not mentioning how extremely fast things are moving in the cloud era.

Indeed a lot of things in k8s are deprecated every 6 months, and in fact your super solid future proof stack is completely useless after a year. It's like building above quicksand.

Re: Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?

#320

Post by fertrevino »

DevOps has its days numbered. What you see is the wide adoption of DevOps in every industry. This trend is likely to plateau and decline in the next couple of years, after which DevOps practices are taken for granted and become rather an expectation from customers. The DevOps problem only needs to be solved once, public cloud providers are almost there.
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