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Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

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41–50 of 183 posts

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#41

This is obviously slightly exaggerated, but I do feel like this whenever people dismiss Kubernetes as either too complicated or not needed. The response I always got when suggesting Kubernetes is "you can do all those things without Kubernetes" Sure, of course. There are a million different ways to do everything Kubernetes does, and some of them might be simpler or fit your use case more perfectly. You can make diffe…

Honestly the main problem is people using k8s for something that's like... a database, and an app, and maybe a second app, that all could be containers or just a systemd service. And then they hit all the things that make sense in big company with like 40 services but very little in their context and complain that complex thing designed for complex interactions isn't simple

But if you want some redundancy, k8s let's you just say run 4 of this, 6 of this on these 3 machines. At least I find it quite straight forward.

The database is more complex since there is storage affinity (I use cockroachDB with local persistent volumes for it) - but stateful is always complicated.

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#42

Found this the same day I published this: https://github.com/oddur/yoink Kubernetes was overkill (I do that all day, 5 days a week); Kamal was too restrictive, so I found myself rolling out Yoink. Just what I need from k8s, but simple enough I can point it to a baremetal machine on Hertzner that can easily run all my workloads.

> found myself rolling out Yoink

- using Tailscale SSH is brilliant

- using caddy-docker-proxy for ingress is brilliant

What do you use for:

- service discovery

- secret store (EDIT: Crap you use Infisical. No shade, I just have this horrible foreboding it will end up like Hashicorp. I use Conjur Secretless Broker but am tracking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47903690)

- backing up and restoring state like in a DB

PS: Have you been having issues with Hetzner the last few weeks?

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#43
Why both posts mention docker compose and not mentioning docker swarm. Being using it for my projects for long time. And it's so nice. Similar syntax, easy networking, rollout strategy, easy to add nodes to cluster.

You can have one template docker-compose.yaml file and separate deployment files for different envs, like: docker-compose.dev.yaml, docker-compose.prod.yaml

I think swarm is really underrated

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#44
I've experienced something like this at work but with data warehouse instead, and it happened multiple times (to be fair, data engineering is still fairly new where I'm from).

One example was an engineer wanted to build an API that accepts large CSV (GBs of credit reports) to extract some data and perform some aggregations. He was in the process of discussing with SREs on the best way to process the huge CSV file without using k8s stateful set, and the solution he was about to build was basically writing to S3 and having a worker asynchronously load and process the CSV in chunks, then finally writing the aggregation to db.

I stepped in and told him he was about to build a data warehouse. :P

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#47
post #2

IMO, Kubernetes isn't inevitable, and this seems to paint it as such. K8s is well suited to dynamically scaling a SaaS product delivered over the web. When you get outside this scenario - for example, on-prem or single node "clusters" that are running K8s just for API compatibility, it seems like either overkill or a bad choice. Even when cloud deployed, K8s mostly functions as a batteries-not-included wrapper around…

Kubernetes, in the form of k3s, was a critical success factor for us with the onprem deployment of our SaaS product.

What's the problem with a single-node cluster? We use that for e.g. dev environments, as well as some small onprem deployments.

> Even when cloud deployed, K8s mostly functions as a batteries-not-included wrapper around the underlying cloud provider services and APIs.

Which batteries are not included? The "wrapper around the underlying cloud provider services and APIs" is enormously important. Why would you prefer to use a less well-designed, more vendor-specific set of APIs?

I seriously don't get these criticisms of k8s. K8s abstracts away, and standardizes, an enormous amount of system complexity. The people who object to it just don't have the requirements where it starts making sense, that's all.

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the main problem is people using k8s for something that's like... a database, and an app, and maybe a second app, that all could be containers or just a systemd service. And then they hit all the things that make sense in big company with like 40 services but very little in their context and complain that complex thing designed for complex interactions isn't simple

But if you want some redundancy, k8s let's you just say run 4 of this, 6 of this on these 3 machines. At least I find it quite straight forward. The database is more complex since there is storage affinity (I use cockroachDB with local persistent volumes for it) - but stateful is always complicated.

Most of the time you don't need redundancy. You need regular backups for exceptional circumstances. And k8s gives you more complexity, and more problems through more moving parts, to give you the possibility of using a feature you'll never need, and if you do start to use it it'll probably be instead of fixing performance problems downstream

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#49

This is obviously slightly exaggerated, but I do feel like this whenever people dismiss Kubernetes as either too complicated or not needed. The response I always got when suggesting Kubernetes is "you can do all those things without Kubernetes" Sure, of course. There are a million different ways to do everything Kubernetes does, and some of them might be simpler or fit your use case more perfectly. You can make diffe…

> This is VERY powerful

No argument there. The Toyota 5S-FE non-interference engine is a near indestructible 4 cylinder engine that's well documented, popular and you can purchase parts for pennies. It has powered 10 models of Camrys and Lexus and battle proven. You can expect any mechanic who has been a professional mechanic for the last 3 years know exactly what to do when it starts acting up. 1 out of 4 cars on the road have this engine or a close clone of it.

It's not what any reasonable person would use for a weedwhacker, lawnmower, pool pump or an air compressor.

Re: Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)

#50

I've experienced something like this at work but with data warehouse instead, and it happened multiple times (to be fair, data engineering is still fairly new where I'm from). One example was an engineer wanted to build an API that accepts large CSV (GBs of credit reports) to extract some data and perform some aggregations. He was in the process of discussing with SREs on the best way to process the huge CSV file wit…

If it was less than 100 gb, he probably should have just loaded the whole thing in RAM on a single machine, and processed it all in a single shot. No S3, no network round trips, no chunking, no data warehouse.
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