51–60 of 88 posts
"Less than 25 per cent of those surveyed said they could accurately predict how much they’d spend on Kubernetes to within 5 per cent of actual cost." The premise seems off to me. Of course people have a hard time predicting the cost of an autoscaling infrastructure that they haven't had for a long time. Presumably they moved off of a fixed size infrastructure to get to Kubernetes. Where they were either paying for ex…
I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it. The unpredictability of cost is actually t…
Unfortunately AWS is the new oracle. No one ever gets in trouble for picking it and its a great way to make it look like you as a high up exec provide value. Look how fast we are iterating now with my decision. It almost always ends in a mess of unmaintainable unthought out services that someone else has to come and clean up or move to the next proprietary service. The last 5 years for me has been soul crushing as so…
IT has always had issues with people cargo cutting solutions without understanding the details, and the cloud is no different.
I have experienced first hand several cases of k8s gone wrong. In the end I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't really need the complexity of k8s. Seriously, most k8s projects I have been involved with required so much effort to bootstrap and keep it going, it just blew me away! The experience for the average developer was just frustrating and infuriating: AWS ECS to the rescue! Some will argue: ven…
If you want to run a complex service consisting of multiple microservices, auto scaling and so on, nothing beats Kubernetes. But you're right, most small businesses just need a simple web site, and for them, an Amazon Lightsail VM might suffice.
I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it. The unpredictability of cost is actually t…
Unfortunately AWS is the new oracle. No one ever gets in trouble for picking it and its a great way to make it look like you as a high up exec provide value. Look how fast we are iterating now with my decision. It almost always ends in a mess of unmaintainable unthought out services that someone else has to come and clean up or move to the next proprietary service. The last 5 years for me has been soul crushing as so…
I hear they might need to move it all to Azure soon!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately AWS is the new oracle. No one ever gets in trouble for picking it and its a great way to make it look like you as a high up exec provide value. Look how fast we are iterating now with my decision. It almost always ends in a mess of unmaintainable unthought out services that someone else has to come and clean up or move to the next proprietary service. The last 5 years for me has been soul crushing as so…
I recently experienced this firsthand, in a company which owned no computers beyond employee laptops. The product was entirely built of AWS services created by a pile of Terraform spaghetti. It was only really understood by someone whose superpower was the ability to keep an apparently unlimited number of levels of indirection in his head. I hear they might need to move it all to Azure soon!
I'm not sure if you made that post as a joke or not...but you just described a certain San Francisco based startup that operates in the SPF/DKIM/DMARC space...
Which company (if you can say) were you describing?
I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it. The unpredictability of cost is actually t…
Are those of us happy/comfortable with current major cloud offerings simply not speaking up here? I can't fathom running a data center any longer for a company of nearly any size. Given my team's responsibilities, this would require 2-3x more headcount with significantly worse SLA/SLO if we still ran our own datacenter. Maybe it's not such a big deal for places with constant demand? Or is this just a case of observer…
Cloud boxes are insanely expensive (easily 10x the price of the equivalent in house box, taking hosting, power, cooling, hw into account).
To make this work, you need a combination of variable demand, and only paying for partial salaries (your cloud boxes are mutualized with other people's boxes).
If you're a reasonably big company (tens of thousands of servers) , with fairly stable demand, and adequate capacity planning, you won't necessarily save a huge amount of money by outsourcing your DCs. You can argue that the gcp/aws guys are better than you at running fleets of servers and data centers , but at 10x the price, it's worth double checking. If all I do is raw compute 100% of the time on a very large scale, it's extremely likely I want to do it myself.
Obviously, there's more than raw hardware to the cloud, starting with all kinds of managed services, which can be worth it. Again , you'll have to do the maths :10x for the boxes, then extra for the distributed db? Does it give me a competitive advantage? Better time to market?
In the end, there are good use cases, and bad use cases for the cloud, and I don't think it's as clear cut as what you say.
EDIT : if cloud hardware prices were not completely ridiculous (say 2x), then it might suddenly be a lot more compelling, and I would most likely agree with you (security / regulatory issues aside).
We have been hearing this a lot from our customers who use EKS. They are running single clusters as shared infrastructure so have no insight into which workloads are contributing the most costs. This is true with other shared infra like data pipelines.
We are currently working on a solution for pod-level cost insights if anyone is interested in signing up for the beta shoot an email to ben@vantage.sh
This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up. Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"
From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…
In all seriousness, what other side is there? The SRE's role is to make sure you never encounter kubernetes. eg... you have a git repo and some branches - if you push to them, deployments magically happen. As a non-SRE, what parts of kubernetes would you actually be touching or interacting with?
1. Companies had critical infrastructure for the success of Kubernetes owned by teams that opposed deploying Kubernetes
2. The primary person shepherding Kubernetes into the company's environment had not done their due diligence on what were appropriate workloads for Kubernetes and what were not and how applications would integrate across mixed environments when required.
3. The principal tech resources at the company were not educated about containerization, Kubernetes, and the intricacies of container networking but were on the hook internally for the implementation.
What ends up driving the "black hole of unpredictable spend" is that companies are sold (either internally or externally) on a relatively short migration timeframe, but that timeframe is contingent on the company having appropriate infrastructure, staffing, and no key persons internally blocking said migration. If any factor is out of whack the migration timeline can quickly approach infinite.
While it is true that there are startups that could run everything they need for their first 10k customers on 5 VMs w/ Nginx & MySQL that decide to build grandiose environments in Kubernetes they don't need. The opposite is also true, which is that there are huge enterprises who could in reality massively benefit from Kubernetes in their environment but for "political" reasons can't get it done even after spending millions of dollars, so are stuck mired in their "legacy" environments. Networking, in particular, is a huge barrier of entry for enterprise Kubernetes deployments and are almost always stymied by people, not technology, because most enterprises have some Boomer network admin who doesn't actually know anything about networking but only knows about Cisco gear running things.
So, what do companies do? They go to AWS or GCP and they just run up a /massive/ bill, as they very very slowly migrate (often rewrite) their legacy systems to the cloud. This is of course astronomically and unnecessarily expensive, but it's generally not the fault of the underlying technology. AWS and Google are happy to bilk major enterprises as well, and often sell them a bill of goods they can't deliver on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…
My only experience with k8s is trying to run it in-house on a cluster of servers. I could never get it to work. Ansible makes much more sense to me.