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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#401

Post by falcolas »

snuxoll wrote: post #372
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.

> Persistant volumes rely on NFS (or a flavor thereof), which is not great for database performance. NFS is an option, but it’s not the only option. If you need locally attached storage you can use local PV’s which went GA in Kubernetes 1.14, or any of the plethora of volume plugins that exist for various network storage solutions.

Network storage, NFS or other, is never optimal for DB storage. It can and is used, but it’s never going to be as good as local storage.

I had forgotten about local storage; it’s not something we can use in our environment.

It’s a moot point, in either case. Vitess doesn’t rely on persistent storage, it relies on replicas and backups.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#402

Post by melq »

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…

I'm curious how long ago you were at that company serving 3m customers a day. I have not been in the industry very long, so I don't really know what things were like >5 years ago, and don't want to sound as if I'm pretending to be an expert.

That said, a couple thoughts that came to mind:

1. having only 4 servers in 2 locations serving 3m customers a day seems crazy to me, atleast in the context of current practices regarding highly available systems.

2. not sure your cost comparisons are fair, in the first case you're talking about cloud costs (so including hardware, 3rd party services/api fees, etc), but in the second you're just talking hosting fees.

If your first company had a relatively static, hardware-heavy (gpus doing most of the work) workload, easily handled by a few servers -- then it would be crazy to pay for a cloud provider. And it wouldn't make much sense to bother with k8s or containers either (imo).

On the other hand, if the more recent company has a dynamic/spikey, software-heavy workload, with a ton of different services, orders of magnitude more infrastructure, and (being fintech) much more demanding SLAs... then it might make a lot of sense to use a cloud provider and take advantage of k8s. Especially if you're a start up that doesn't have the time/expertise to deal with datacenter design.

I agree that there's a lot of unnecessary fixation on the latest and greatest these days, but there are definitely situations where kubernetes can be very valuable.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#404

Post by turtlebits »

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?

I find that K3s is great for getting started. It has traefik included and its less of a learning curve to actually be productive, vs diving in with K8s and having to figure out way more pieces.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#405

Post by Aeolun »

jedieaston wrote: post #343
viraptor wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change docker-compose to load balanced dokku nodes. Gives you the deployments and sidecars.

Dokku is magical. It blows my gob whenever I use it. It’s the best parts of Docker and Heroku together, and I can actually control everything that goes with my app.

I find that Dokku requires me to do too much on the machine itself, well as forcing me into a certain model.

I currently use exoframe with docker-compose files, and it's fantastic.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#406

Post by dilyevsky »

falcolas wrote: post #398
dilyevsky wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should leave snark for topics you have some knowledge of. PVs based on network attached drives have been around from the very start. Their performance is quite good. Vitess can use them (https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/tree/master/helm/vitess#c...)

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#407

Post by mekster »

notyourday wrote: post #162
closeparen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. Systemd already runs all your services in cgroups, so the same resource limit handles are available. It doesn't do filesystem isolation by default, but when we're talking about Go / Java / Python / Ruby software does that even matter? You statically link or package all your dependencies anyway.

Not only systemd runs your code it also does file system isolation built-in, runs containers, both privileged and non-privileged and sets up virtual networking for free. systemd-nspawn / machined makes the other systems look like very complicated solutions in search of a problem

systemd-nspawn seems overlooked by many.

Name may not be pretty but it's an official feature of systemd which is used to debug the systemd development and it is far easier to take backups incrementally because the container files are just plain files in /var/lib/machines/ and apparently you already have it if systemd is on your system. (May need an additional package to be installed from OS package repo.)

I run nspawn instances as development environments for developers and I can also run docker inside it.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#408

Post by mekster »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #71
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…

With "Swarm", do you mean Docker Swarm? Why has it "fizzled"? The way I learned it in Bret Fisher's Udemy course, Swarm is very much relevant, and will be supported indefinitely. It seems to be a much simpler version of Kubernetes. It has both composition in YAML files (i.e. all your containers together) and the distribution over nodes. What else do you need before you hit corporation-scale requirements?

A little off topic but why do these orchestration tools always prefer to use YAML as I really feel it a harder to understand format than JSON or better TOML and it's the only thing that I don't like about Ansible.

I see ruby kind of uses YAML often but are people comfortable editing YAML files? I always have to look up how to do arrays and such when I edit them once in a while.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#409

Post by kiddico »

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…

What happens if you give the mouse a hammer?

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#410

Post by verdverm »

hootbootscoot wrote: post #334
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?

Ansible. You can keep your YAML and deploy actual virtual servers on your cloud provider. Kubernetes is an introvert and this doesn't correspond to anything but it's padded cell walls. In Ansible it's an extrovert, an exoskeleton. Kubernetes insides out makes it right again. Make sense?

No, not following. I understand how master based provisioning management systems had their time and place, but we've largely moved beyond that to baking images, whether containers or VMs. Running a master based system comes with a whole house of other issues. Ansible is now relegated to a better system than based for installing packages and configuring the baked image. The time of booting a vanilla imstamce and then installing software when a scaling events happens is over.

By the way, what does ansible do to help with scaling applications?

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