Live data from Hacker News

As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

techcrunch.com

51–60 of 156 posts

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#51
post #46
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kube is too complex. To derive any kind of business value from it you need highly skilled people. The winner of the container orchestration battle will be the one that simplifies, not complicates. To me this is just another hype train, like TensorFlow/Caffe before it, and like Hadoop/Spark before that. These tools all have their uses in specific, non-common cases, but for your average business they are a net loss in…

Too complex compared to what? All other commonly used web infrastructure is complex in various ways. In my experience building and running Kubernetes clusters for Fortune 500 companies is that actually it's much simpler, it's just different from traditional infrastructure. Different != Complex.

I guess we worked at different Fortune 500 companies. What I see are companies adding complexity to their web infrastructure where none needs to exist.

A vanishingly small number of use cases require 100's of nodes, and the accompanying orchestration. Stack Overflow runs a top 25 website on 9 webservers, and most of those are just redundancy. Nothing Ansible/Bash or Powershell/MSDeploy can't solve in orders of magnitude less time. And debugging/diagnosing problems is much easier.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#52
post #41

Kubernetes is one of those rare cases where the industry is rallying around a technologically sound platform that emerged from the trenches, and not something that was designed to create jobs for consultants. It's great. Right now, there's a bunch of fairly traditional players such as Red Hat, but none of them are in a position to mess it up. What I'm waiting for, though, is for a big player to do a modern, clean "Ku…

Kube is too complex. To derive any kind of business value from it you need highly skilled people. The winner of the container orchestration battle will be the one that simplifies, not complicates. To me this is just another hype train, like TensorFlow/Caffe before it, and like Hadoop/Spark before that. These tools all have their uses in specific, non-common cases, but for your average business they are a net loss in…

k8s is not complex. You basically can spin up a cluster in no time on CoreOS via pxe/ipxe. You do not even need all these fancy stuff around k8s. You only need to ssh into your machine to start bootkube (on a single machine) or later to update the kubelet (can be done with ansible). Everything else can be managed via kubectl.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#53
post #52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kube is too complex. To derive any kind of business value from it you need highly skilled people. The winner of the container orchestration battle will be the one that simplifies, not complicates. To me this is just another hype train, like TensorFlow/Caffe before it, and like Hadoop/Spark before that. These tools all have their uses in specific, non-common cases, but for your average business they are a net loss in…

k8s is not complex. You basically can spin up a cluster in no time on CoreOS via pxe/ipxe. You do not even need all these fancy stuff around k8s. You only need to ssh into your machine to start bootkube (on a single machine) or later to update the kubelet (can be done with ansible). Everything else can be managed via kubectl.

CoreOS, PXE, bootkube, kubelet, kubectl. And you say it's not complex? I don't think you and I will ever agree on the meaning of that word.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#54
post #46
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kube is too complex. To derive any kind of business value from it you need highly skilled people. The winner of the container orchestration battle will be the one that simplifies, not complicates. To me this is just another hype train, like TensorFlow/Caffe before it, and like Hadoop/Spark before that. These tools all have their uses in specific, non-common cases, but for your average business they are a net loss in…

Too complex compared to what? All other commonly used web infrastructure is complex in various ways. In my experience building and running Kubernetes clusters for Fortune 500 companies is that actually it's much simpler, it's just different from traditional infrastructure. Different != Complex.

Were the Fortune 500 companies hosting k8s on-prem or on a cloud provider? From an operational standpoint, I can see where GP is coming from, especially if you are hosting on-prem, for non-greenfield projects.

Trying to integrate a k8s cluster into legacy infrastructure is non-trivial, and requires knowledgeable operations teams to deploy. Troubleshooting k8s requires extensive domain knowledge, in addition to foundational understanding of fairly advanced networking and distributed systems concepts. In my experience, working with k8s also requires much more vigilant watching of the project space for (breaking) changes, updated docs, SIG news, and github issues. Even if Google or Amazon is managing the k8s management, troubleshooting your app using kubectl, etc. is a new skill to learn.

I actually like a lot about using k8s, but I understand when people complain about the complexity.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#55
Kubernetes is cool and all, but there needs to be a lot of simplification for it to be "nice to use". Essentially the problem is that it's the "opposite" of Golang - the number of ways to do the same thing is massive leading to huge numbers of headaches in trying to get things done.

Recently, I spun up a simple pod-to-pod communication example but I found it pretty difficult. If you look up cluster networking in Kubernetes (https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster-administration/n...) you'll find a whole fire hose of different options from ingress to calico to fabric and on and on.

This was what it took for me to try and rubber ducky my way to getting networking to work on Kubernetes, and in the end I had to get help from a friend at work (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50195896/how-do-i-get-on...). It may be better than what came before, but it's not great.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#59
post #53
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

k8s is not complex. You basically can spin up a cluster in no time on CoreOS via pxe/ipxe. You do not even need all these fancy stuff around k8s. You only need to ssh into your machine to start bootkube (on a single machine) or later to update the kubelet (can be done with ansible). Everything else can be managed via kubectl.

CoreOS, PXE, bootkube, kubelet, kubectl. And you say it's not complex? I don't think you and I will ever agree on the meaning of that word.

Debian, PXE/CDs/USB sticks/whatever install medium you wanna use, ansible, systemd, ssh. And you say it's not complex? I don't think you and I will ever agree on the meaning of that word.

Currently running a application on anything is always complex in any kind of sense.

Re: As Kubernetes grows, a startup ecosystem develops in its wake

#60
Does anyone knows a very good CD for k8s?

I found that only bitbucket deployments is a good one in terms of simplicity of managing deployments (just like Heroku). Most vendors forces me to use their crappy CI solution for doing CD. Why they want me to migrate to your (very limited) build system? I can pay you for a fancy dashboard, but please, allow me to use whatever i need to build my software. There are many options on the market for CI and you just can't build them for everybody. But good CD is a way to go and easier to manage. Just give me a hook for registering for a new build (say docker image versions) and help me manage this stuff. I have tried Spinnakle, but it is too fragile for me - there are no simple way to install it (k8s even easier!) and UI is too bad for a small project.

Good CD is still missing in k8s ecosystem.

Post reply on HN