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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#501

Post by Perseids »

rocho wrote: post #470
pnako wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few people actually need high availability. If you do, the recipe is to reduce the number of components, get the most reliable components you can find, and make the single points of failure redundant. Saying you can use Kubernetes to turn whatever stupid crap people tend to deploy with it highly available, is like saying you can make an airliner reliable by installing some sort of super fancy electronic box inside. Y…

What about application upgrades? Are you ok with your application going down for each upgrade? With Kubernetes, it's very simple to configure a deployment so that downtime doesn't happen.

If and only if your application supports it. Database schema upgrades can be tricky for instance, if you care about correctness.

On the other hand, atomic upgrades by stopping the old service and then starting the new service on a Linux command line (/Gitlab runner) can be done in 10 seconds (depending on the service of course – dynamic languages/frameworks sometimes are disadvantaged here). I doubt many customers will notice 10 second downtimes.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#502

Post by saalaa »

zelly wrote: post #394

Main benefits of Kubernetes: • Lets companies brag about having # many production services at any given time • Company saves money by not having to hire Linux sysadmins • Company saves money by not having to pay for managed cloud products if they don't want to • Declarative, version controlled, git-blameable deployments • Treating cloud providers like cattle not pets It's going to eat the world (already has?). I was…

This, and more but it's all in the same vein.

I was pretty skeptical too but then handed over a project which was a pretty typical mixed bag: Ansible, Terraform, Docker, Python and shell scripts, etc... Then I realized relying on Kubernetes for most projects has the huge benefit of bringing homogeneity to the provisioning/orchestration which improves things a lot both for me and the customer or company I work for.

Let's be honest here, in many cases it does not make a difference whether Kubernetes is huge, inefficient, complicated, bloated, etc... or not. It certainly is. But just the added benefit of pointing at a folder and stating : "this is how it is configured and how it runs" is huge.

I was also pretty skeptical of Kustomize but it turned out to be just enough.

So, like many here. I kind of hate it but it serves me well.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#503

Post by 101404 »

zelly wrote: post #394

Main benefits of Kubernetes: • Lets companies brag about having # many production services at any given time • Company saves money by not having to hire Linux sysadmins • Company saves money by not having to pay for managed cloud products if they don't want to • Declarative, version controlled, git-blameable deployments • Treating cloud providers like cattle not pets It's going to eat the world (already has?). I was…

I like that alternative. Especially now that we have Rust and Actix Web.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#504

Post by [deleted] »

Perseids wrote: post #488
toyg wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust and Go could help you there, and their deployment story is as excellent as C/C++: just compile and ship. However, their learning curve is pretty steep (particularly Rust) and most developers don’t enjoy having to worry about low-level issues, which makes recruitment and retention a problem. Whereas one can be reasonably proficient with Python/Ruby in a week, Java/C# is taught in school, and everyone has to know…

Do those highly available developers have the same quality as the Rust developers you could get, though? (On average.) I'd wager there is a correlation between interest in deeper topics as required by Rust and good long term design and quality. I've seen how marvelously efficient a small team of very talented people can be be. To replace them with the average highly available developers you would need far more than d…

[deleted]

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#505

Post by narag »

slim wrote: post #482
edwinyzh wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or a Free Pascal server (powered by mORMot ( https://github.com/synopse/mORMot) )? Natively compiled, high performance, and supports almost all OS's and CPU's

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Try removing the trailing parenthesis.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#506

Post by [deleted] »

Sherl wrote: post #459
StavrosK wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do automated deployments, though? I don't like using K8s for small stuff, but I am also extremely allergic to having to log on to a server to do anything. Dokku hits the sweet spot for me, but at work I would probably use Nomad instead.

Set your pod to pull image always and have entrypoint shell script that clones the repo, kill the pod so on restart you could get your code deployed. You could run init container with Kaniko that pushes image to repo and then main container that pulls that back but for that you need to do kubectl rollout restart deploy If you are looking for pure CI/CD gitlab has awesome support or you could do Tekton or Argo. They c…

[deleted]

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#507

Post by pas »

Perseids wrote: post #475
tutfbhuf wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see your point for small hobby projects. But enterprise web development in C++ is no fun at all. For example: "Google says that about 70% of all serious security bugs in the Chrome codebase are related to memory management and safety." https://www.zdnet.com/article/chrome-70-of-all-security-bugs... Developer time for fixing these bugs is in most cases more expensive, than to throw more hardware at your software…

True, but the alternative to C++ with that reasoning is Rust or Go (depending on your liking), not Ruby. And with both of these you can step around a lot of deployment issues, because a single server can be sufficient for quite high loads. Avoid distributed systems as much as you can: https://thume.ca/2020/05/17/pipes-kill-productivity/

I find that the big problems that k8s solve is the usual change management issues in production systems.

What do we want to deploy, okay, stop monitoring/alerts, okay, flip the load balancer, install/copy/replace the image/binary, restart it, flip LB, do the other node(s), keep flipping monitoring/alerts, okay, do we need to do something else? Run DB schema change scripts? Oh fuck we forgot to do the backup before that!

Also now we haven't started that dependent service, and so we have to rollback, fast, okay, screw the alerts, and the LB, just rollback all at once.

And sure, all this can be scripted, run from a laptop. But k8s is basically that.

...

And we get distributedness very fast, as soon as you have 2+ components that manage state you need to think about consistency. Even a simple cache is always problematic (as we all know how the cache invalidation joke).

Sure, going all in on microservices just because is a bad idea. Similarly k8s is not for everyone, and running DBs on k8s isn't either.

But, the state of the art is getting there. (eg the crunchydata postgresql operator for k8s.)

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#508

Post by dorian-graph »

zelly wrote: post #394

Main benefits of Kubernetes: • Lets companies brag about having # many production services at any given time • Company saves money by not having to hire Linux sysadmins • Company saves money by not having to pay for managed cloud products if they don't want to • Declarative, version controlled, git-blameable deployments • Treating cloud providers like cattle not pets It's going to eat the world (already has?). I was…

> • Company saves money by not having to hire Linux sysadmins

.. but hire others to manage k8s? Or existing software engineers have to spend time doing so?

Many of the other points don't seem unique to k8s either.

I do like the alternative you've suggested though.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#509

Post by pas »

capableweb wrote: post #498
bmikaili wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree with the GUI part. Text based configuration is stable, version-controllable, and intuitive to use. Look at Xcode for a nightmare of GUI configuration.

> stable, version-controllable, and intuitive to use Neither of those features are inherently impossible to do with GUIs. Alternatively, you can have a GUI editing your text based configuration. Although, doesn't look as cool so, here we are.

There are quite a few GUI tools for k8s.

Currently mainstream k8s is text based, because it's still too fast moving and new. Creating a great GUI would be a serious overhead and there's not enough interest/demand for it. It'll come eventually.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#510

Post by pas »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #493
pathseeker wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The part of the equation you are missing is how little traffic the majority of business applications end up seeing. A B2B app that has at most 10 concurrent requests can run on the smallest EC2 instance whether it's written in PHP or written in C++. Bandwidth doesn't change with language choice and neither does the storage requirements of your app so those billable items don't come into the equation either. So the CP…

I agree with you. So maybe the question we should ask ourselves is: why isn’t there a smaller, cheaper EC2 instance (or any other provider than AWS) ? This industry is tailoring the levels. Of course it’s understandable because, well, they live on it. And they count on small instances to share hardware ressources to overbook said hardware. And I don’t blame them for that, I’m doing the same on my own bare metal serve…

Scaleway, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, etc.

AWS LightSail.

... also the t1.micro is small and cheap. Could you give some concrete numbers?

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