Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation • Hacker News Board

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#531

Post by mountainriver » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 3:41 PM UTC

movedx wrote: post #482

mountainriver wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but managed k8s is really simple and wildly a better pattern than just running VMs. You don’t need google scale for it to help you, and spinning things up without understanding the maintenance cost is just bad engineering

> Sorry but managed k8s is really simple ... If you need a service to manage K8s for you, then that's a red flag already (regarding K8s, not you personally.) If the service is so complicated that experienced engineers tell me constantly that only managed K8s is the way to do it, that tells me enough about why it's going to be a rough journey that should probably be avoided with IaaS or PaaS. > ... and wildly a better…

> If you need a service to manage K8s for you, then that's a red flag already

It's really not, k8s does a ton for you, trying to do the same with VMs would be unbelievably complex

> that should probably be avoided with IaaS or PaaS.

PaaS is great till it isn't, seen plenty of companies hit the edges of PaaS and then need to move to k8s

> infrastructure when it's based on straight IaaS/SaasS/PaaS

Again this is great till it isn't (see heroku) and then people move to k8s. Having control and understanding of the underlying infrastructure is important unless your just running some basic web app

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#532

Post by mountainriver » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 3:42 PM UTC

watermelon0 wrote: post #402

mountainriver wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but managed k8s is really simple and wildly a better pattern than just running VMs. You don’t need google scale for it to help you, and spinning things up without understanding the maintenance cost is just bad engineering

You want simple? Heroku, Render, DigitalOcean AppPlatform

Yeah isn't Heroku dead? PaaS is great till it isn't then you're screwed, seen plenty of companies be forced to move off of PaaS to k8s because of the edges. Its fine if you are running a basic web app

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#533

Post by mountainriver » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #380

mountainriver wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but managed k8s is really simple and wildly a better pattern than just running VMs. You don’t need google scale for it to help you, and spinning things up without understanding the maintenance cost is just bad engineering

No, it's not. If going for managed services: A load balancer + an asg is stupid simple to setup and it just works.

A basic k8s service is just as easy if not easier and takes you way further

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#534

Post by mountainriver » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

throwaway787544 wrote: post #389

mountainriver wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but k8s isn’t hard at all if you know it, it’s actually substantially easier than a couple web servers and dbserver and provides a whole lot more

Rocket science isn't hard if you know it. Should we all build spaceships to deliver groceries? Good luck finding a few local rocket scientists in a pinch. You can find plenty of auto mechanics though. Cars are cheaper and ubiquitous. Maybe they can't drive to the moon, but they can get most things done. Unless your business is flying to the moon, stick to cars and trucks over spaceships.

lol what? k8s isn't rocket science, for a basic web app its a single yaml file

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#535

Post by mountainriver » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #372

mountainriver wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but k8s isn’t hard at all if you know it, it’s actually substantially easier than a couple web servers and dbserver and provides a whole lot more

So, your argument is that you should use a tool if you know how to use it, regardless of if it's actually needed? Personally I would take managing "a couple of webservers and a db" any day over k8s.

yeah I use k8s for basic webapps and it works wonderfully, and is way way easier than anything else, and yes I started developing in the 90s so I've seen it all. There is a bit of overhead in learning k8s, but once you know it, it's dead simple for every use case I've found and takes you way further than anything else.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#536

Post by _jezell_ » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

This post is a red flag signaling the author doesn't know what he's talking about.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#537

Post by mikkergp » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

rfoo wrote: post #453

mikkergp wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not like vms have magical simplicity guardrails. I run all my personal stuff in K8s because it’s what I know and it’s all pretty set it and forget it. If it really is that simple, or your comfortable with Ansible great! but I’ve seen lots of issues on VMs with mountains of custom deploy scripts, or OS’ that can’t be upgraded, or manual configurations people don’t understand.

> OS’ that can’t be upgraded Well, with Kubernetes this became container images versions and operator versions that can't be upgraded. Though I agree with your in general.

It's true. And Kubernetes is not the magic sauce that fixes all problems either. It _can_ be a pretty efficient problem generator itself :-)

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#538

Post by jen20 » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

politician wrote: post #506

jen20 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DevOps is about giving Developers a dedicated System Operations job for some small fraction of their time. No. DevOps is about the development and operations disciplines working together in a cross functional way to deliver software faster and more reliably. In a small enough startup both disciplines may be represented by a single person, though.

I respectfully disagree. I’ve scaled these teams myself, and it’s about giving developers in a small organization the job of deploying the solution and ensuring that it runs. In larger organizations, DevOps becomes impossible and it naturally splits into Dev and Ops. It’s important to understand where it works and when it stops working to effectively manage the transition as the business grows.

> In larger organizations, DevOps becomes impossible

News to me. I work at one the biggest companies around, and our DevOps posture is pretty great, and that was achieved by cross functional teams from the historic dev and historic ops teams doing all the things that Accelerate codified.

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#539

Post by jhoelzel » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 7:08 AM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #528

jhoelzel wrote: post #81

Guys Kubernetes is a container platform for multiple nodes. I know it seems hard to understand from the outside, but its really not. You would naturally come up with ALL the same componets if you were to take your container strategy onto multiple computers. What if you dont need multiple servers? Well go the single node approach and have a flexible, true and tested way to spin up containers, which can and should be a…

> Using Containers is pre mature optimization too? maybe I should get my typewriter. You seem to have missed the alternative "get a computer" in between there.

well I grew up provisioning and using dedicated servers and nowadays you get much tighter security from the container ecosystem that I would on a dedicated server.

I have just provisioned another bare metal k8s cluster, taking software of dedicated servers and.... well if I dont have to, im not running bare metal anymore in 2022.

If you want to just "get a computer in there" have a look at harvester, its the best of the two worlds

Re: Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

#540

Post by mbonca » Wed, Jul 06, 2022, 12:14 PM UTC

kitd wrote: post #376

pritambarhate wrote: post #84

Doesn't look like the author knows what he is talking about. His point about early stage startup should not use K8S is fine. But the next advice about not using a different language for frontend and backend is wrong. I think the most appropriate advice is to choose a stack which the founding team is most familiar with. If that means RoR then RoR is fine. If it means PHP then PHP is fine too. Another option is to use…

I suspect a lot of the gripes and grousing about Kubernetes comes from SMEs trying to run it themselves. That will often result in pain and cost. Kubernetes is a perfectly good platform for any size operation, but until you are a large org, just use a managed service from Google/Amazon/DigitalOcean/whoever. Kubernetes, the data plane, is really no more complex that eg Docker Compose, and with managed services, the co…

Exactly! I chose k8s managed by Google years ago. As a solo developer you can have a cluster up and running with a web server, fronted by a Google LB with Google managed certificates in under an hour. Just follow one of the hundred tutorials. Just as quick and easy as setting up a single VM. But that really isn't the point is it. If that is all I needed, yes I'd use a $10 VPS. But for an "application", not a web site, you always need more.

My k8s "cluster" is a single node that doesn't cost me any more than a VM would. I don't need the scalability at the moment. But I do need different environments for dev, qa, and prod. And all three are running identically next to each other using Namespaces. Saved us a ton of maintenance and cost.

Any project that grows has its needs change. GKE gives you a ton of integrated tools right from the start including logging, alerting, metrics, easy access to hosted databases, pub/sub, object storage, easy and automatic network setup, easy firewall setup, dns management, and a lot more. k8s is no different than using any other hosted service. It provides a great set of features that you configure using fairly consistent yaml configuration files. And it is all accessible from the web based "Google Console" as well.

Learning the k8s yaml format and some basic kubectl commands is all you need to get going and it saves a TON of time that can go back into developing your application rather than dealing with configuring disparate pieces with their own configuration methods.

I was fairly early to k8s while they were still competing with other similar solutions and other tools like Puppet and Chef. I tested all of them and truthfully, k8s was the easiest to learn, implement, and maintain my app with. Using GKE of course. I would NEVER as a one man or even small team of developers take on managing an installation of k8s myself.