Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is K8s Too Complicated? 

jmoiron.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 171 posts

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#51

Post by vorpalhex »

ad_hominem wrote: post #20
pstadler wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though I fully agree with you, running a little 3 node cluster just for fun is amazing. Thanks to Rook and an Nginx ingress controller with kube-lego, I’m able to deploy applications leveraging distributed storage and getting tls secured endpoints without a single ssh session. This, in my point of view, is absolutely powerful. Shameless plug, I‘ve been working on a project explaining how to run small scale clust…

You may want to update your tutorial to use cert-manager because kube-lego is in maintenance-only mode

cert-manager is marked as alpha/non-production currently.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#52

Post by stapled_socks »

Having worked with Docker Swarm previously - Kubernetes seems like they added 5 layers of abstractions and at the same time made it feel more low-level.

I think Kubernetes has all the building blocks to be great but desperately needs a simplified flow/model and UI for developers who just want to run their apps.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#53

Post by Steeeve »

Yes. There wouldn't be so many different vendor solutions if it wasn't. I wouldn't say that the complexity isn't warranted, and it obviously can be wrangled in and once you know it it's not all that bad.

Conversely, it wouldn't be as popular as it is if the value it provided wasn't clear.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#54

Post by zie »

Filligree wrote: post #39
akvadrako wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosted k8s. all the benefits with almost no extra maintenance.

Okay, how about for a tiny budget?

Nomad (www.nomadproject.io) is what I would recommend.

Nomad is ONLY a task scheduler across a cluster of machines. Which is why it’s not rocket science, nor is it operationally complex.

You say I need X cpu and X memory and I need these files out on disk(or this docker image) and run this command.

It will enforce your task gets exactly X memory, X cpu and X disk, so you can’t over-provision at the task level, Docker and friends don't do this.

It handles batch(i.e. cron) and spark workloads, system jobs(run on every node) and services (any long-running task). For instance with nomad batch jobs you can almost entirely replace Celery and other distributed task queues, in a platform and language agnostic way!

You can do load balancing and all the other things k8s does, but you use specialized tools for these things:

   * For HTTPS traffic you can use Fabio, Traefik, HAProxy, Nginx, etc.
   * For TCP traffic you can use Fabio, Relayd, etc.
These are outside of Nomad’s scope, except that you can run those jobs inside of Nomad just fine.

and it’s all declarative, a total win.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#55

Post by s_kilk »

vorpalhex wrote: post #51
ad_hominem wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to update your tutorial to use cert-manager because kube-lego is in maintenance-only mode

cert-manager is marked as alpha/non-production currently.

(Off Topic) interesting that we're seeing two radically different philosophies of software development in this thread, in stark contrast.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#56

Post by Jyaif »

perlgeek wrote: post #33

Suppose I'm an application developer who is only interested in infrastructure because there needs to be some to run my stuff. In this scenario, would I actually learn Kubernetes, or would it make more sense to go to straight to a PaaS solution? Like OpenShift (which uses k8s in the backend, I believe), or Cloud Foundry, Stackato etc. I always get the impression that k8s has a lot of good ideas, but doesn't provide ev…

> Suppose I'm an application developer who is only interested in infrastructure because there needs to be some to run my stuff.

Yes, you are the perfect candidate for a PaaS solution. In general, unless you are spending thousands of dollars in infra per month, managing your own services is a waste of money.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#57

Post by matthewmacleod »

I suppose we have to assume that we should use the right tool for the right job, and all that. And I'm sure that the Kubernetes folk know what they're doing. But I definitely think that it's too complicated without a cutting-edge Kubernetes expert in place to manage it. And even then, it's just a building block for a larger system.

I've tried maybe half a dozen times to get started for relatively small workloads – let's say between 5 to 50 servers. There seems to be a lack of any good documentation on how to get started – sure, I can spin up a couple of pods on a cluster or whatever, but then actually taking that to an easy-to-deploy, load-balanced, publicly-accessible infrastructure seems to be much harder.

It's maybe a lack of some kind of official, blessed version of a "this is how you should build a modern infrastructure from container to deployment" guide. There are so many different moving parts that it's hard to figure out what the optimal strategy is, and I've not found much to make it easier.

Maybe there's actually a niche for a nice and simple "infrastructure in a box" kind of product. I'd love something like Heroku that I could run on my own bare metal, or on AWS – the various solutions I've tried were all lacking.

In the end I've fallen back to using the Hashicorp stack of Nomad and Consul. This seems to work in a much simpler way that I can actually wrap my brain around – I get a nice cluster running balanced across machines, deploying and scaling my applications as required, and it was super easy to set up with good documentation.

I've been nervous about this approach because of how Kubernetes-mad the industry seems to have gone – so maybe it'll be worth another look when there are some more comprehensive solutions in place that make it easier to get started!

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#58

Post by zie »

jaequery wrote: post #10

what are some of the downsides of K8? any horror stories?

like @fear91 almost said, but didn't quite get there.. it's operationally VERY complex. It has it's reasons for being so complex, but jeez! doesn't help that tooling and docs are all over the map. Right now I'd say it's useful only if you can afford to hire a handful of very talented k8s knowledgeable people to babysit it, because it def. needs babysitting.

Maybe in a few years it will be nicely stable. Otherwise you make someone like Google, Microsoft, etc run it for you.

Or skip the complexities and use something operationally simple and sane like Nomad or FreeBSD Jails.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#59

Post by thdxr »

Yes it's too complicated. But I think it's a low level tool that most people will use via an abstraction built on top. We use Rancher which makes using kubernetes a breeze.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#60

Post by tejohnso »

"I suspect that a significant source of programmers flooding into management is the decreasing wavelength of full scale re-education on how to accomplish the exact same thing slightly differently with diminshing returns on tangible benefits."

Wow. I'm curious to see how others are interpreting this sentence.

I've got:

I suspect many developers opt to move on to management largely because of frustration with having to learn new abstractions with increasing frequency and decreasing benefit.

Post reply on HN