Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation • Hacker News Board

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#431

Post by K0SM0S » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

Dan_Sylveste wrote: post #378

K0SM0S wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously not, I was just pointing out that infra like k8s even under-the-hood for intermediaries (like web agencies) is still not always the norm given the real-world failures. There's this intermediary world between startups and giant corporations, you know. ;-)

>infra like k8s even under-the-hood for intermediaries (like web agencies) is still not always the norm That's because 'the norm' for web agencies is a site that does basically zero traffic. If a company hires a 'web agency' that's by definition because the company's business model does not revolve around either a web property or app. Whether that's a gas station company or a charity or whatever, the website is not k…

I very much agree with you. I must have been unnecessarily critical in my initial comment, I did not mean it as a rant, more like an observation about where-we're-at towards what seems an inevitable conclusion to me. Sorry that came out wrong, clearly I got carried away.

In asking if "Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation", you correctly explain why we're yet on the "yes" side for the typical web agency category.

[Although FWIW I was hinting at a non-trivial category who should know better than not to setup a scale-ready infra for some potentially explosive clients; which is what we do in the entertainment industry for instance, by pooling resources (strong hint that k8s fits): we may not know which site will eventually be a massive hit, but we know x% of them will be, because we assess from the global demand side which is very predictable YoY. It's pretty much the same thing for all few-hits-but-big-hits industries (adjust for ad hoc cycles), and yes gov websites are typically part of those (you never know when a big head shares some domain that's going to get 1000x more hits over the next few days/weeks), it's unthinkable they're not designed to scale properly. Anyway, I'm ranting now ^^; ]

My unspoken contention was that eventually, we move to a world where k8s-like infra is the de facto norm for 99% of infrastructure out there, and on that road we move to the "no" side of the initial question for e.g. web agencies (meaning, we've moved one notch comparable to the move from old-school SysAdmin to DevOps maybe, you know those 10 years circa 2007-2018 or so).

[Sorry for a too-terse initial comment, I try not to be needlessly verbose on HN.]

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#432

Post by ezekiel11 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:16 PM UTC

With the advent of serverless product offerings, I agree 95% here. The other 5% are on premise, own their own server enterprises, which I know, are rare.

It no longer makes sense to spend so much resources on orchestration or distributing across multiple hardware.

Not when you can simply write code and have it running globally distributed on edge. You would be doing yourself a disservice to not follow this new paradigm shift.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#433

Post by ezekiel11 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #287

movedx wrote: post #278

I agree entirely. I like to call what the author is referring to as, "What-If Engineering". It's the science of thinking you'll be Google next week, so you build for that level of scale today. It involves picking extremely complicated, expensive (both in compute and skilled labour) technologies to deploy a Rails app that has two features. And it all boils down to, "But what if..." pre-optimising. It happens at all le…

I've told this story before on HN, but a recent client of mine was on Kubernetes. He had hired an engineer like 5 years ago to build out his backend, and the guy set up about 60 different services to run a 2-3 page note taking web app. Absolute madness. I couldn't help but rewrite the entire thing, and now it's a single 8K SLOC server in App Engine, down from about 70K SLOC.

absolutely nuts to think what that would look like. Is he building services to abstract out english grammar? Have one service called VerbManager that returns a boolean if a given word is a verb, have another one called AdjectiveManager that does similar and so on.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#434

Post by charlie0 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:18 PM UTC

Tehchops wrote: post #407

charlie0 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. Previous devs at co I joined wanted to play DevOps cowboys. They used Ansible scripts to spin up various AWS services costing the company over 100K/yr. New lead came in, got rid of that crap by using 3rd party services to spin up infrastructure. Got a load balancer, a few VMs + DB. Reduced the cost down by 85% and greatly simplified the entire stack. I learned a really valuable lesson without having to make…

I know this utterly misses the larger point of your comment, but: > They used Ansible scripts to spin up various AWS services This seems less about using the "cool/new" tech... rather it's about using the "right" tech. Config management tools like Ansible/Chef/Puppet are very much previous-generation when it comes to cloud infrastructure. They... can manage cloud infrastructure, but they were created prior to the ubi…

Yeah, this project was several years old. Take this with a grain of salt, I'm not familiar with timelines in terms of k8s, but I would guess that it had not yet risen to popularity as it has in more recent years.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#435

Post by AtNightWeCode » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:19 PM UTC

The part of Kubernetes and startups is 100% correct I believe. It is very hard for some people to not own a thing. People can be very narrow-minded about buying a service. Even though they at the same time gladly buys work-hours to offload their personal workload.

To set up complete envs for dev, test and prod with GIT, full CI/CD and everything you need like databases and storage is less than 20 hours work in a modern cloud. This is something that comes with low maintenance as well. If you think containerization and Kubernetes is a better option, you are basically incompetent when it comes startups.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#436

Post by zinclozenge » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #380

mountainriver wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but managed k8s is really simple and wildly a better pattern than just running VMs. You don’t need google scale for it to help you, and spinning things up without understanding the maintenance cost is just bad engineering

No, it's not. If going for managed services: A load balancer + an asg is stupid simple to setup and it just works.

How do you deploy your code in this scenario, ssh into VMs?

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#437

Post by DuskStar » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

movedx wrote: post #270

okamiueru wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think their advice about not using it in a startup is correct either. You just need to somewhat know what you're doing. I know of such a case, where a single engineer could leverage the helm chart open source community, and set up a scalable infrastructure, with prometheus, grafana, worker nodes that can scale independently of web service, a CI/CD pipeline that can spin up complete stacks with TLS automated t…

> I know of such a case, where a single engineer could leverage the helm chart open source community, and set up a scalable infrastructure, with prometheus, grafana, worker nodes that can scale independently of web service, a CI/CD pipeline that can spin up complete stacks with TLS automated through nginx and cert-manager, do full integration tests, etc. I found that to be quite impressive, for one person, one year,…

> They used the work of others to get to the result.

Should everyone go back to assembly on bare metal, then?

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#438

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:21 PM UTC

beachy wrote: post #121

cryptonym wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sad, JavaScript was already not great for front-end and we now get it in backend and even the edge. Most job offers are for a mythical full-stack developper that'll master web design, CSS/HTML, front-end interactions and code, networking, back-end architectures, security,... You end-up with people who don't have time to get enough expertise and write and build clean stuff. Hacking poor JavaScript code everywhe…

I'm far from a full stack developer, but really how much code would actually be common across the front and and back end? I would have thought maybe some validation code, not sure how much else?

Serialization/deserialization and templates are a huge pain to keep identical. The rest, not so much.

So, if you can keep all of your templates on a single place, and don't have a lot of data diversity, you won't have a problem. But if that's not your case, you do have a problem.

Personally, I think the frontend code should be more generic on its data and organized around operations that are different from the ones the backend sees. But I never could turn that ideal into a concrete useful style either.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#439

Post by honkycat » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:22 PM UTC

Sometimes I wonder what planet these people are coding on. Hosted k8s makes it so easy.

The other day I spun up a new eks cluster, created some Iam roles, installed the cert-manager, external dns, and aws alb ingress controller.

Then I pushed a deployment, a service, and an ingress and BOOM. Log aggregation, automatic dns, secret handling, ...I can go on.

It is simpler than normal aws services in my experience.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#440

Post by ezekiel11 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 5:24 PM UTC

tr33house wrote: post #180

As a startup founder that's not VC funded, I would totally recommend you look into building with kubernetes from the get go. The biggest learning curve is for the person setting up the initial deployments, services, ingress etc Most other team members may just need to maybe change the image name and kubectl apply to roll things out. Knowing that rollouts won't bring down prod and that they can be tested in different…

the only rationale to do what you described is if and only if you have outside capital. If you are spending your hard earned boostrapped cash on this, I'm sorry but its a poor business decision that won't really net you any technical dividends.

Again, I really see this the result of VC money chasing large valuations, and business decisions influencing technical archietcture, a sign of our times, of exuberance and senselessness

Engineering has to raise the cost of engineering to match it (280 character limit crud app on AWS lambda with 2 full stack developers vs 2000 devs in an expensive office).