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Do I Need Kubernetes?

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Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#51

Post by halbritt »

peterwwillis wrote: post #13

Here's a quick reference: 1) Are you on AWS? Then you don't need Kubernetes. Use Fargate. 2) Are you on Google Cloud? Then you don't need Kubernetes. Use Cloud Run. 3) Are you on Azure? Then you don't need Kubernetes. Use Azure Container Instances. 4) Are you on a PaaS like Heroku? Then you don't need Kubernetes. 5) Are you on a random VPC provider / bare metal machines? You could probably still do without Kubernetes…

> do you have about a million dollars to spend on building and maintaining it all? Then you need Kubernetes.

I think you're overstating the investment necessary to overcome the initial complication of Kubernetes and also understating the benefit of being on a platform with a massive and thriving community behind it.

As an example, in a prior role, there were a set of data engineers that would receive data in the form of MS SQL server backups from which these engineers would need to query and transform data on an exploratory rather than production basis. Certainly one could use an "undifferentiated" service from a cloud provider, but it was also a roughly 5-minute process for me to use the rather high quality helm chart and docker image commonly available to stand up a new service for the benefit of each engineer that had the need.

The process of creating that automation necessary to deploy the helm chart and restore the backups took approximately one hour and could be repeated ad nauseum in the aforementioned 5-minute time period.

There are many, many other examples of this. Want a data-science platform complete out of the box with no vendor lock-in, how about data8.org? The list goes on.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#52

Post by aliswe »

mrweasel wrote: post #3

I only have one tiny detail: Bursty traffic means that your cluster needs to be able to deal with the peaks. If you running an on prem Kubernetes cluster, then there is no savings, unless you can use the capacity for something else during non peak periods. The scaling, and potential savings is a cloud feature, not a feature of Kubernetes.

I would nitpick that and say "if you are running a cluster with a static number of worker nodes".

If I would have a cloud hosted k8s cluster and don't configure any auto scaling, the situation would be equivalent to me buying x number of physical machines and hosting them as worker nodes on prem. No ability to scale to "bursty traffic".

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#53

Post by aliswe »

spost wrote: post #23

I work for a startup whose product is small (half a dozen servers, if relatively beefy ones) clusters that will be run on-prem by customers, at least sometimes in a low-to-no-touch capacity. Most of our application components are micro-ish services that are run on all hosts in the cluster for either extra capacity or fault tolerance. We currently run everything on mesos/marathon, but are looking to switch away from i…

Really provisioning a VM manually is equivalent to provisioning a physical server. Just commented on this above.

Try using eg. Ubuntu and some kind of centralised management tool, like Salt, and install k8s. For better control, use Flux for storing your k8s configuration (deployments, configs, etc) in Git. I believe it would be good for your sanity.

Else your k8s objects will be susceptible to someone doing a klutz and "whoops" your applications are gone, real gone...

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#54

Post by aliswe »

peterwwillis wrote: post #13

Here's a quick reference: 1) Are you on AWS? Then you don't need Kubernetes. Use Fargate. 2) Are you on Google Cloud? Then you don't need Kubernetes. Use Cloud Run. 3) Are you on Azure? Then you don't need Kubernetes. Use Azure Container Instances. 4) Are you on a PaaS like Heroku? Then you don't need Kubernetes. 5) Are you on a random VPC provider / bare metal machines? You could probably still do without Kubernetes…

OK, saying that Azure CI is a substitute to Kubernetes is very misleading. Sorry if this is misrepresenting what you're saying, but basically I see this as saying you don't need k8s, just use Docker without k8s.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#55

Post by te_chris »

ramraj07 wrote: post #5

Not a single mention of elastic beanstalk or App Engine? The best middle ground for small teams who just want one reliable website with minimal scaling (and who can't just choose a nom-aws service).

We tried to use app engine and it was a nightmare for us. K8s has a ramp, but it’s been incredibly smooth now that we’re setup and going.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#56

Post by gravypod »

JamesSwift wrote: post #30
gravypod wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makefiles are nice in theory but don't scale well to team members who don't know how to use make. If your team is full of experienced C/C++ devs then this will probably work great for you. If you are working with a bunch of android/javascript/etc developers who've never seen make, and who haven't exercised the skillset of reading through 3-decade-old email threads to find answers, you'll find that the only thing you'…

Dont these issues also apply to the docker-compose alternative? I'm recommending make as "the one tool" to use for all of your teams apps. No matter what app they work on, everything is setup with `make bootstrap` and everything is run with `make up`. Everything is deployed with `make deploy`. They dont need to understand the _how_, only the _what_.

No, other tools do not suffer from what makes make complex. Make is "hard" because of a few things:

    1. The syntax is very complex
    2. It's just a wrapper around shell command execution
    3. There's no single standard everyone fully implements
If I implemented a makefile then I'd have to make sure it's compatible with MacOS and GNU Make. The syntax for make files and target deps are also very complex "Do I want to use % or $ or @?" Make also implements very few pieces of functionality. It forks out SHELL for most things and because of this you need to have everything your makefile is using installed on your system. If you have a makefile, invariably, someone implements some tool that's super helpful and works.... until it doesn't. It depends on some system configuration or utility that is no longer a dep of something you've manually installed and the makefile breaks. If you use containers for all of your functionality this is no longer an issue because you can vendor base layers of OSs/images and make sure they don't break. You can also test these changes, that could be breaking, without rolling out to other developers. I cannot test if my Makefile will run on a developer's mac if I don't have a mac myself and even then it's a crap shoot (do they have homebrew? is their PATH correct? etc).

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#57

Post by dang »

kseistrup wrote: post #16
dennis_jeeves wrote: post #15

No

Exactly! Betteridge’s law of headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. ⌘ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Mr. Betteridge retired after a thousand of these or so. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Interestingly, it was pg who got it going on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880

I once used the joke about Mr. Betteridge retiring and got a reply pointing out that he hasn't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10393754.

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#58

Post by tln »

save_ferris wrote: post #12
gravypod wrote: post #6

> Run your applications in Docker from day 1 (with docker-compose it’s as valuable for dev as it is for production) and think carefully before letting your applications store local state. I think this is the key take away for many startups. Get it so you: 1. Have a single-command way to bring up your entire backend 2. That command can run on your dev machine 3. You document all of the settings for your containers and…

> people were amazed by the productivity gains Yeah, docker compose is great for running distributed apps locally when everything “just works”. The problem is that it also impedes development when the compose setup isn’t fully optimized. I work on dockerized rails apps, and whenever a new dependency is added, it can take 15 minutes to rebuild the image, which completely breaks my flow. Docker also creates a ton of da…

First, make sure you only copy your Gemfile and maybe Gemfile.lock before running bundle install. If you aren't that could explain the amount of bloat since every build will create some large layers with no chance of re-use.

You could try making your own base image that installs your gems. Eg, copy your Dockerfile to Dockerfile.base. Remove everything after the bundle install, and build to say app-base:latest.

Then change the FROM in your Dockerfile to app-base, and remove any OS package installs. Keep the bundle install; it will use the layer from app-base if unchanged, or do an incremental install if not.

This will reduce the amount of data bloat too.

You could try using guard-bundler or something similar to further streamline the process when adding gems

Re: Do I Need Kubernetes?

#59

Post by gravypod »

spanhandler wrote: post #46
gravypod wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makefiles are nice in theory but don't scale well to team members who don't know how to use make. If your team is full of experienced C/C++ devs then this will probably work great for you. If you are working with a bunch of android/javascript/etc developers who've never seen make, and who haven't exercised the skillset of reading through 3-decade-old email threads to find answers, you'll find that the only thing you'…

Yeah but if you use bare tools then it’s hard to change them and the interface may differ project to project. If you let the JS developers pick your universal build tool then they’ll want to change it annually because now the old one they loved is “terrible” and some other thing is great and is definitely the way forward. Plus then you’ll need node on every machine that needs to run the build, and probably you’ll wan…

The solution here is to choose a build system that is language agnostic. The most common of these is docker & docker-compose. There's also the Blaze-likes (Pants, Buck, Bazel, Please) that let you hermetically include tools like node inside of the build chain.

Make is not a "wrapper" it's a "translucent layer on top of" since it doesn't hide the deps on the underlying tools.

When I do `docker build -t ... something` or `bazel build //something` I don't need to care if it's node, C++, Java, etc. I just need to know that it is a thing that I want to build. Make cannot deliver that to you as you need all of your system toolchains installed and you need to make sure your makefile works on every OS/system config.

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