Why is Kubernetes getting so popular? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#381

Post by marktolson » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:35 AM UTC

snuxoll wrote: post #375

marktolson wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We edit yaml files everytime we update a service version, which happens multiple times per week? Is there a better way to deal with this?

Integrate it with your CI/CD pipeline. I have a Gitlab pipeline that runs kustomize and pipes the output to kubectl for every deploy to do things like setting secrets, image tags, creating ConfigMaps from config files in the repository, etc.

That's essentially what we already do. My original point was based on the fact that the config changes all the time (as opposed to 4 times a year).

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#382

Post by verdverm » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:36 AM UTC

guywhocodes wrote: post #354

verdverm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people ought to do a side by side comparison of a new user learning to K8S v AWS v GCP before claiming Kubernetes adds more complexity than it returns in benefits. Remember the first time you saw the AWS console? And the last time?

I've spent in total a tenth as much time learning k8s and related systems, as I have spent on AWS. Most situations I have a direct comparison, k8s takes less ops. Often thanks to helm. The AWS console is designed for lockin and I could use configuration management for AWS too but the time required to go through their way of doing x is just not worth it. Unless I want to become a AWS solutions architect consultant

Helm is becoming its own nightmare, fortunately work is already begun to replace it gracefully

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#383

Post by jariel » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:37 AM UTC

How big does your company get before you need to step away from a tiny handful of very large EC2s?

If you have 16CPU EC2 for your business logic, one for your DB, and you're smartly hosting your static content elsewhere or via Cloudflare ... I mean you need to have a 'big company' before going too far beyond that.

What gives? What are all these startups doing?

This is not a story about K8's, this is entirely something else, it's about psychology, complexity, our love of it, or rather our 'belief' that complexity = productivity that solving 'the hard infra problem' must inherently, be somehow be 'good for the company' because it 'feels difficult' and therefore must be doing something powerful or at least gaining some kind of competitive advantage?

(Aside from the 'Docker is Useful and K8's follows' point which actually makes sense a little bit ...)

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#384

Post by ninkendo » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

courtf wrote: post #280

I honestly couldn't tell you. What I can tell you, is that the unbelievable bloat in the complexity of our systems is going to bite us in the ass. I'll never forget when I joined a hip fintech company, and the director of eng told us in orientation that we should think of their cloud of services as a thousand points of light, out in space. I knew my days were numbered at exactly that moment. This company had 200k uni…

Your argument is about complexity but it doesn’t really speak to kubernetes itself. You can have some dead simple architecture on top of k8s. Hosting your own k8s though, that’s pretty complex, but get that working (or have your cloud provider just host a cluster for you) and things can be pretty darned simple.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#385

Post by jen20 » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

jjjensen90 wrote: post #356

nihil75 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IaaS is not "the cloud". it was in 2008 when all we had was EC2 and RDS. Today Kubernetes is the antithesis of the cloud - Instead of consuming resources on demand you're launching VMs that need to run 24/7 and have specific roles and names like "master-1". Might as well rent bare-metal servers. It will cost you less.

You are completely wrong. It is trivial to have your k8s control plane and your workload cluster in something like an ASG, and basically know nothing about the nodes in either group. I'm not even using GKS or EKS, just ASGs on AWS. My servers and applications are cattle, not pets. I knew literally nothing about k8s in September and now I have multiple clusters humming along, treating the worker cluster nodes as a gen…

> Kubernetes IS the spirit of the Cloud and 12 factor apps.

I would argue that Kubernetes has _nothing whatsoever_ to do with the spirit of the Cloud, and that in fact "serverless" embodies the spirit of pay-as-you-use consumption models.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#386

Post by nautilus12 » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:42 AM UTC

bradgessler wrote: post #341

I’ll take a shot. k8s is popular because Docker solved a real problem and Compose didn’t move fast enough to solve orchestration problem. It’s a second order effect; the important thing is Docker’s popularity. Before Docker there were a lot of different solutions for software developers to package up their web applications to run on a server. Docker kind of solved that problem: ops teams could theoretically take anyt…

Hit the nail on the head. How else could you at the push of a button not just get a running application but an entire coordinated system of services like you get with helm. And deploying a kubernetes cluster with kops is easy. I don't know why people hate on k8s so much. For the space I work in it's a godsend

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#387

Post by eyberg » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:44 AM UTC

There's a silent majority of people that don't use k8s (or containers) - hell there is a significant portion of servers that don't even use linux. I find the majority of engineers my age (mid 30s) think it is nothing more than straight marketing - between said marketing fueled vc dollars and "every company is a software company" there's a very good reason why k8s has taken off but I'd ask the following:

Why should it have?

Many people I talk with will complain about security, performance and complexity of k8s (and containers in general). Non-practicing engineers (read: directors/vps-eng) will complain about the associated cost with administering their k8s clusters both in terms of cloud cost and devops personnel cost.

Someone earlier mentioned it was the new wordpress - I don't think that's an unfair comparison, although I would challenge the complexity/cost of it.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#388

Post by pnako » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:45 AM UTC

kronin wrote: post #316

wolco wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why run it at all? The cost must be 10 times more this way. It is mostly for the fun of learning. I come from the opposite approach. I have 4 servers two digital ocean $5 and two vulr $2.50 instances. One holds the db. One server as the frontend/code. One server to do heavy work and another to server a heavy site and holds backups. For $15 I'm hosting hundreds of sites, running so many background processes. I…

Sounds like your setup lacks high availability. If you don't believe you need that, then yeah, kubernetes is overkill.

Few people actually need high availability.

If you do, the recipe is to reduce the number of components, get the most reliable components you can find, and make the single points of failure redundant.

Saying you can use Kubernetes to turn whatever stupid crap people tend to deploy with it highly available, is like saying you can make an airliner reliable by installing some sort of super fancy electronic box inside. You don't get more reliability by adding more components.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#389

Post by aprdm » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:46 AM UTC

p_l wrote: post #282

tetha wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the advantage and the problem of nomad. We're using it a lot by now. Nomad, or rather, a Nomad/Consul/Vault stack doesn't have these things included. You need to go and pick a consul-aware loadbalancer like traefik, figure out a CSI volume provider or a consul-aware database clustering like postgres with patroni, think about logging sidecars or logging instances on container hosts. Lots of fiddly, fiddly th…

I count the "glue it with existing infrastructure" to be higher cost than doing it from scratch. It was one feature that I definitely knew regarding Nomad, as one or two people who used it did chime in years ago in discussion, but for various reasons that might not be applicable to everyone I consider those unnecessary complication :)

Depending on how big the infrastructure is and how long you want to migrate over... usually there's not enough resources to "redo all from scratch", millions of LoC are already in production, people who owned key services are no longer in the company, other priorities for business exists other than have what you have already working in k8s..

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#390

Post by javajosh » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

Easy: the perception of infinite overhead. The cloud itself (e.g. EC2) gives you capacity-on-demand, but the glue to make all the nodes work together is missing. And its a really hard problem, in general, because its distributed systems. K8s fills that demand, or seeks to. The alternative is to roll-your-own, which is possible but expensive, error-prone, and difficult to hire for. (My last company discovered this to their detriment after sinking a LOT of time into building out a really complex Salt+Vagrant+AWS solution, and then decided to migrate to k8s).