‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’ • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#41

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:06 AM UTC

thefounder wrote: post #20

Blackstone4 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is quite a cynical view. Amazon and other cloud providers want to attract and keep users by providing the best product possible. This may come in different forms so some people want easy-to-setup databases (AWS RDS) others want auth (IAM) handled for them, others scalability (Appengine) or maybe email (SES). In order to create these services and to make life easier for those who want them, it may req…

What stops Google from open sourcing Datastore, or AWS from open sourcing dynamoDB? These cloud providers with proprietary services are the new Oracle. They are actually worse than Oracle b/c they can cut off your access to your database in seconds. Google open sourced k8 so that they can get a pie from AWS and then lock you in with other proprietary services.

DynamoDB is dependent on many of AWS’s services and infrastructure.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#42

Post by martingxx » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:07 AM UTC

Blackstone4 wrote: post #23

thefounder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops Google from open sourcing Datastore, or AWS from open sourcing dynamoDB? These cloud providers with proprietary services are the new Oracle. They are actually worse than Oracle b/c they can cut off your access to your database in seconds. Google open sourced k8 so that they can get a pie from AWS and then lock you in with other proprietary services.

> What stops Google from open sourcing Datastore, or AWS from open sourcing dynamoDB? They have invested millions into creating cloud software. If they open source it, what is stopping other firms from taking that software and creating their own cloud offering? Would you work for free? Would you open source all the work you have done?

Its 2019 and people still confuse the different kinds of "free" when talking about open source software.

(Also, yes, I open source as much of my work as possible, and I'm paid to write it)

Also, AWS is BUILT on open source, they just don't open source the extra bits they added on top. Just like how Microsoft took an open source tcp/ip stack and open source web browser, added some stuff, and called it their own.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#43

Post by cs02rm0 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:17 AM UTC

paulftw wrote: post #40

Software Engineer's fallacy: if all you have is software/programming skills you start to look for an open source linux based solution to holding wooden boards in place, one that doesn't vendor lock you into the iron ore. With Windows vs Linux the premise was you install absolutely free software on a computer you already own and you end up with a superior computing and programming environment. With k8s - you switched…

With k8s - you switched to it, now what? You have to buy server hardware, rent or build a room, run wires for electricity and broadband, build cooling, physical security, etc etc etc.

I'm not sure that's the choice. You can run kubernetes in the cloud, can't you? e.g. EKS on Amazon.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#44

Post by martingxx » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:18 AM UTC

trpc wrote: post #12

while I don't really understand how ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is related to ‘Windows vs. Linux’, I guess k8s is a threat to AWS primarily when it comes to EC2 just like it is a threat to commercial linux distros since it makes the underlying VM and host OS totally temporary and replaceable, but what can k8s do to AWS SaaSes (e.g. RDS, SNS, etc...)? almost nothing (even though it gives you the opportunity to migrate from one SaaS…

> what can k8s do to AWS SaaSes (e.g. RDS, SNS, etc...)?

k8s has allowed us to not use RDS any more because we now host PostgreSQL inside k8s instead. It's a bit more overhead, but we're now portable and run in gcp too with the same k8s manifests and almost no porting effort.

So yeah, we escaped the lock-in.

And now we're not just tied to the AWS stuff and we're experimenting with cockroachdb and other products that aren't there "natively" in AWS, so beyond escaping lock-in, we're more ready to experiment with newer stuff.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#45

Post by cs02rm0 » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:20 AM UTC

jpgvm wrote: post #39

In my experience AWS is the huge waste of time. I spent years on and off effectively building poor implementations of k8s to make AWS digestible to developers. If you work in "IT" rather than infrastructure for a large software company you might not have experienced this as internal IT is more static and easy to run on AWS/VMWare/whatever. For me k8s finally signals moving beyond that problem and onto more interestin…

I've hardly looked at k8s, it looked like a pain to get a docker-compose file running in it the last time I looked. I think there was a tool to translate it to something kubernetes could deal with.

That said, after the last four months I've had of trying to get Route53, API Gateway, Lambdas, ECS, VPCs, Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, etc, etc running in CloudFormation I really can't imagine it's worse under any slightly involved scenario.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#46

Post by jrudolph » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

brtknr wrote: post #32

Drawing comparison between OpenStack and K8s is also invalid IMO... they operate at different levels of abstraction. You can use K8s with OpenStack as a cloud provider as with any other cloud provider. K8s is intended to abstract away the infrastructure that lies underneath and give you a consistent way to deploy services across different cloud providers.

The point made by OP is not so much about the technology but about drawing parallels between the history of and hopes held for both projects. Both OpenStack and K8s were/are hyped as solutions to reduce vendor lock-in, although they do so in different ways.

The parallels between the two are startling, i.e. at the beginning of OpenStack vendors tried to differentiate themselves by solving distribution/installation and plug-ins/integrations. How many K8s distros/installers are out there right now? Countless... [0] provides an interesting angle to the discussion that vendors trying their best to differentiate themselves is what ultimately led to the demise of OpenStack. I'm so far optimistic the same won't happen to K8s. Google is investing into K8s as a vehicle to gravitate workloads to GCP, but in order to do so it has to maintain some level of compatibility to other cloud vendors.

0: https://aeva.online/2019/03/what-happened-to-openstack/

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#47

Post by bhouston » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:24 AM UTC

newaccoutnas wrote: post #6

I'm not really following, perhaps it's too early here. AWS is a cloud provider, Kubernetes is container orchestration software. Here's a crazy thing, we do K8S on AWS.

K8S is the commoditization of of Amazon's compute infrastructure. This standardizes it and makes it easier to switch and to build vendor independent tooling around it. Of course the strategy of AWS now at least be the first two parts of the old Microsoft strategy with regards to open standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... (Hopefully not the third part.)

There is still lots that Amazon does that is unique and proprietary. And it has tons of respect in the industry.

But as more becomes standardized on Kubernetes and more becomes automated via Service Providers, it will make further commoditize the market.

Google needs to do the following: - Better CDN that can work with any origin. - Work hard on getting Service Providers/Service Catalog into Kubernetes with all the latest Google Services (it is very patchy support at the moment.) - Buy Gitlab and support the shit out of it -- that is one great product.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#48

Post by rakoo » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:24 AM UTC

carlsborg wrote: post #8

Inaccurate analogy. Container based compute is a very small part of the AWS ecosystem. You are missing the bigger picture. Companies are migrating to AWS for end to end managed infrastructure including directory services, databases (sql and non sql), managed ETL pipeline infrastructure, batch processes, backups, data processing and analytics at scale, high durability storage at scale, a host of mobile app services, e…

I think you're actually agreeing even more with the author. Windows has everything you need for most of the usages you would have, all of it is integrated and the out of the box experience is functional. Linux at the time was a big mess of different softwares with different guarantees of working, maintained by duct-tape bash scripts and custom configuration files. If you wanted something, you had to work to have it.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#49

Post by martingxx » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:26 AM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #21

Anybody who thinks that Kubernetes can be compared to AWS has absolutely no idea what these things are.

Can you elaborate?

I disagree with you and I have been using both (as well as gcp) in production for years.

They are both platforms that you write an application stack against. One is portable and can run in any cloud, the other only works in AWS.

Just because one is ALSO a cloud provider doesn't make them incomparable.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#50

Post by majewsky » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 10:26 AM UTC

brtknr wrote: post #32

Drawing comparison between OpenStack and K8s is also invalid IMO... they operate at different levels of abstraction. You can use K8s with OpenStack as a cloud provider as with any other cloud provider. K8s is intended to abstract away the infrastructure that lies underneath and give you a consistent way to deploy services across different cloud providers.

In fact, my team does Kubernetes on OpenStack on Kubernetes. :)

It's OpenStack on Kubernetes because we deploy the OpenStack components on a baremetal Kubernetes cluster (with actual payloads running in VMware), and it's Kubernetes on OpenStack because we have an addon service that allows customers to spin up Kubernetes on the VMware VMs created by OpenStack. We also dogfood this because the baremetal Kubernetes cluster is not large enough to hold all our internal services.