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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#391

Post by pnako »

tristor wrote: post #118

The simple answer is that Kubernetes isn't really any of the things it's been described as. What it /is/, though, is an operating system for the Cloud. It's a set of universal abstraction layers that can sit on top of and work with any IaaS provider and allows you to build and deploy applications using infrastructure-as-code concepts through a standardized and approachable API. Most companies who were late on the Clo…

What if instead they revamped their ancient microservices into modern monolithic applications?

I'm sorry, but I can't stand this kind of bullshit. You cannot possibly take two random things, put 'modern' in front of one word and 'ancient' in front of another, to justify changing things.

The problem of Kubernetes is probably that people started drinking the microservices koolaid and now need complex solution to deploy their software that became more complex when they adopted a microservices architecture.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#392

Post by dilyevsky »

falcolas wrote: post #330
roman_sf wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

good thing kubernetes can restart pods fast and have persistent volumes!

Persistant volumes rely on NFS (or a flavor thereof), which is not great for database performance. But that's a moot point anyways, since Vitess doesn't use persistent volumes - it reloads the individual DBs from backups and binlogs when a pod is moved or restarted.

Are you saying that iscsi is a “flavor of nfs”? What makes it not suitable for good db performance?

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#393

Post by hartem_ »

bulldoa wrote: post #190
silviogutierrez wrote: post #4

For me, and many others: infrastructure as code. Kubernetes is very complex and took a long time to learn properly. And there have been fires among the way. I plan to write extensively on my blog about it. But at the end of the day: having my entire application stack as YAML files, fully reproducible [1] is invaluable. Even cron jobs. Note: I don't use micro services, service meshes, or any fancy stuff. Just a plain…

Do you have a recommended tutorial for engineer with backend background to setup a simple k8 infra in ec2?

Take a look at https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way.

That’d be a great first step if the purpose is to learn Kubernetes. If, however, you want to set up a cluster for real use then you will need much more than bare bones Kubernetes (something that solves networking, monitoring, logging, security, backups and more) so consider using a distribution or a managed cloud service instead.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#394

Post by zelly »

Main benefits of Kubernetes:

• Lets companies brag about having # many production services at any given time

• Company saves money by not having to hire Linux sysadmins

• Company saves money by not having to pay for managed cloud products if they don't want to

• Declarative, version controlled, git-blameable deployments

• Treating cloud providers like cattle not pets

It's going to eat the world (already has?).

I was skeptical about Kubernetes but I now understand why it's popular. The alternatives are all based on kludgy shell/Python scripts or proprietary cloud products.

It's easy to get frustrated with it because it's ridiculously complex and introduces a whole glossary of jargon and a whole new mental model. This isn't Linux anymore. This is, for all intents and purposes, a new operating system. But the interface to this OS is a bunch of punchcards YAML files that you send off to a black box and hope it works.

You're using a text editor but it's not programming. It's only YAML because it's not cool to use GUIs for system administration anymore (e.g. Windows Server, cPanel). It feels like configuring a build system or filling out taxes--absolute drudgery that hopefully gets automated one day.

The alternative to K8s isn't your personal collection of fragile shell scripts. The real alternative is not doing the whole microservices thing and just deploying a single statically linked, optimized C++ server that can serve 10k requests per second from a toaster--but we're not ready to have that discussion.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#395

Post by winrid »

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…

It sounds like your first company did one thing well, and the second one was trying to do a lot of different things. So while volume was lower, complexity was higher.

Don't get me wrong. I'd still probably build that as a monolith in Java instead of a thousand NodeJS services, but I can see how you end up with Kubernetes.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#396

Post by AlphaSite »

roman_sf wrote: post #345
base698 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use Heroku, AppEngine, or if in k8s, Knative/Rio. It's confusing because a lot of people being exposed to K8s don't necessarily know how Linux networking and web servers work. So there is a mix of terminology (services, ingress, ipvs, iptables, etc) and context that may not be understood if you didn't come from running/deploying Linux servers.

The deal was it all abstracted :) And now developers have to start all over with subnet masks?!

The abstraction was file a ticket and let someone figure it out for you, or script it if it happens often enough.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#397

Post by shiftpgdn »

Aeolun wrote: post #321
shiftpgdn wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS console is very carefully designed to let you create traps that result in spending huge buckets of money if you're not paying attention.

EC2 instances are fairly predictable.

If you're only using EC2 you're overspending by a factor of 5-10. Compute is cheap.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#398

Post by falcolas »

dilyevsky wrote: post #392
falcolas wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Persistant volumes rely on NFS (or a flavor thereof), which is not great for database performance. But that's a moot point anyways, since Vitess doesn't use persistent volumes - it reloads the individual DBs from backups and binlogs when a pod is moved or restarted.

Are you saying that iscsi is a “flavor of nfs”? What makes it not suitable for good db performance?

I sincerely beg your forgiveness for forgetting about a feature that’s only about a year old, and a feature we can’t take advantage of in our own kubernetes environment, or with the Vitess cluster.

Forest, trees.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#399

Post by 0xEFF »

ransom1538 wrote: post #278
tristor wrote: post #118

The simple answer is that Kubernetes isn't really any of the things it's been described as. What it /is/, though, is an operating system for the Cloud. It's a set of universal abstraction layers that can sit on top of and work with any IaaS provider and allows you to build and deploy applications using infrastructure-as-code concepts through a standardized and approachable API. Most companies who were late on the Clo…

Just running docker-compose on load balanced machines is pretty close to having all k8s features (that would give you an endpoint, scaling, running pods[containers],heartbeats and nodes[vms]). If you run Kubernetes on GCP you will see it's just a wrapper of GCP vms, load balancers, instance groups and disks. EG: GCP k8's autoscaling for the nodes isn't any better than just simple GCP load balancers and instance group…

It’s pretty close to get it up and running. It’s not close to operating. You have to roll your own load balancer, health checks, method of updating and managing the underlying nodes, you don’t have operators or guarantees about the control plane, etc...

Spin up a K8S in any major cloud provider and you get all this with a consistent API, which is where the value lies.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#400

Post by snuxoll »

marktolson wrote: post #381
snuxoll wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What are you changing all the time in your config?
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