I've seen people extolling the many benefits of Kubernetes. For those who are all in, how does something like CDK compare?
Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#432Google is known for search and kubernetes. Rest of their products are use and throw.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure "a plain ol' Django monolith" with none of the "fancy stuff" is either what people are referring to when they say "kubernetes", or a great choice for that. I could run hello world on a Cray but that doesn't mean I can say I do supercomputing. Our team does use it for all the fancy stuff, and spends all day everyday for years now yamling, terraforming, salting, etc so theoretically our setup is "entire ap…
Reading this charitably: I guess I agree. k8s is definitely overpowered for my needs. And I'm almost certain my blog or my business will never need that full power. Fully aware of that. But I'm not sure one can find something of "the right power" that has the same support from cloud providers, the open source community, the critical mass, etc. [1] Eventually, a standard "simplified" abstraction over k8s will emerge.…
I've been very pleased with Nomad. It strikes a good balance between complexity and the feature set. We use it in production for a medium sized cluster and the migration has been relatively painless. The nomad agent itself is a single binary that bootstraps a cluster using Raft consensus.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#434I think kubernetes is to Infra what RoR was to Web. Not necessarily in terms of architectural style of MVC, but more towards standardization of similar enough problems that can be put into a mutually agreed convention.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Good questions, and you are onto something here for sure. This wasn't too long ago, around 2014-2015. This was all for a weather radar app, and you are correct, there really weren't any SLA's, but we had to handle very high loads. We did make use of cloud services for some pieces of the system (there was a database and a small API for some minor bookkeeping, mostly around users). I included those costs in my estimate…
Thanks for the detailed reply, I found it very informative. I work on a small team developing 'private cloud' infrastructure for a large company, so I usually find myself on the opposite side of the arguement... trying to highlight the virtues of on-prem hardware and the downsides of 3rd party cloud providers.
We've had to work very hard to allow for developers/sre/ops folks to be able provision vms and bare-metal machines in our datacenters the same way they would in the cloud provider that we use. Obviously its not as fast, seamless or feature-rich as it is with aws/gcp/azure et al, but I'm proud of the progress we've made.
What really kills me though, is that a huge chunk of our engineers seem to think our work is a complete waste of time in the first place. We have several physical dcs, and tens of thousands of machines... but since most engineers don't have to think about costs, or about workloads other than their own, they think of us as out of touch and clinging to the past.
Nothing worse than getting snark about our platform from an SRE who spends their days in a web app glueing together the ready made services of google and amazon while acting as if they're building the world of tomorrow :)
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remember the first time you saw the AWS console? And the last time? There was a time in between for me - that was Rightscale. For me, the real thing that k8s bring is not hardware-infra - but reliable ops automation. Rightscale was the first place where I encountered scripted ops steps and my current view on k8s is that it is a massively superior operational automation framework. The SRE teams which used Rightscale…
> The SRE teams which used Rightscale at my last job used to have "buttons to press for things", which roughly translated to "If the primary node fails, first promote the secondary, then get a new EC2 box, format it, install software, setup certificates, assign an elastic IP, configure it to be exactly like the previous secondary, then tie together replication and notify the consistent hashing." If I understand this…
You could do that, but why? Just use k8s and move on.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on. What? Setting up a load balancer or nginx is considered complex now?
Setting up one is easy. Setting up one that gives multiple separate teams the ability to configure their services, and apply those changes to servers around the world and in different environments, repeatedly and safely, is harder.
We just spent months at my workplace working on a system to reliably define and configure a set of parallel silo'ed integrated datastores, services, and network stack within Kubernetes/ISTIO (and AWS), and to reliably upgrade new software revisions within those silos and to account for the changing "shape" of the configuration/content in these silos. It's repeatable and safe now, but it took a lot of effort.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good questions, and you are onto something here for sure. This wasn't too long ago, around 2014-2015. This was all for a weather radar app, and you are correct, there really weren't any SLA's, but we had to handle very high loads. We did make use of cloud services for some pieces of the system (there was a database and a small API for some minor bookkeeping, mostly around users). I included those costs in my estimate…
Thanks for the detailed reply, I found it very informative. I work on a small team developing 'private cloud' infrastructure for a large company, so I usually find myself on the opposite side of the arguement... trying to highlight the virtues of on-prem hardware and the downsides of 3rd party cloud providers. We've had to work very hard to allow for developers/sre/ops folks to be able provision vms and bare-metal ma…
Wow, sounds like really challenging work. I still think those skills will be valuable for a long time, especially since they are becoming more rare. I'm curious how you prepared for that job, did a specific degree help? I have only learned what was necessary to solve the problems I've been given, and picked things up from others on the job.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my mind standardisation is how we really solve problems in much of software development. Everything before that is just practice and/or hacks.
> In my mind standardisation is how we really solve problems in much of software development. I've been having this thought very often lately. The only way for humans to do something faster is to use a machine. Any machine is built on some assumption that something is repeatedly true, that some things can be repeatedly interacted with in the same way. Finding true invariants is very hard, but our world is increasingl…
It's true not just for machines but engineering in general. Whether it's civil or mechanical or electronic or semiconductor engineering, their foundation is built on setting boundary conditions to make the natural world predictable so that it can be reliably manipulated. Things most often go wrong when those conditions are poorly understood, constrained, or modeled such as when using an unproven material, using imprecise parts, or ignoring thermal expansion when designing structural components.
Engineers have a plethora of quality control standards and centuries of built up knowledge to make this chaos manageable and the problems tractable.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#440Kubernetes is insurance for companies against getting locked in proprietary technologies.
It also promotes immutable infrastructure and hence increases the portability. While some of the things like load balancers and ingress are controlled by cloud provider almost everything else can be seamlessly migrated to another cloud provider or on prem.
It makes dev, test, staging, prod environments consistent and also solves a lot of pain points of managing infrastructre at scale with autoscaling, auto healing and more. Istio adds a lot more kubernetes and makes the supporting microservices even easier.
Its going to be an important piece in Hybrid world as it brings a lot of standardization and consistency in two disparate environments.