Because it’s basically turning things off and on. At scale.
Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
571–580 of 681 posts
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#572I honestly couldn't tell you. What I can tell you, is that the unbelievable bloat in the complexity of our systems is going to bite us in the ass. I'll never forget when I joined a hip fintech company, and the director of eng told us in orientation that we should think of their cloud of services as a thousand points of light, out in space. I knew my days were numbered at exactly that moment. This company had 200k uni…
> is that the unbelievable bloat in the complexity of our systems is going to bite us in the ass. My favorite example of this right now is Vitess. Sure, it's a beautiful piece of technology. But, for a usecase my company is looking at, we'll be replacing one (exceptionally large) DB with in excess of 80 mysql pods, managed by another opaque-through-complexity system running on the top of kubernetes (which already bit…
> Oh, and my current favorite PITA - having to change the API version of deployment objects from 'v1beta1' to 'v1' in over 160 microservice charts as part of a kubernetes version upgrade.
How is this a problem unique to Kubernetes? Don't you have to make similar changes when upgrading a library or dependency that was in beta?
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't agree with the last paragraph. Your C++ example is orthogonal to the deployment aspect because it discusses the application. Kubernetes and the fragile shell scripts are about the deployment of said application. How are you going to deploy your C++ application? Both options are available, and I would wager that in most cases, Kubernetes makes more sense, unless you have strict requirements.
Kubernetes is for orchestrating a distributed system. What I was suggesting is to (1) make a monolith and (2) make it fast, light and high-throughput. The goal of your service is to reliably serve users at scale; this is just another way of doing it, just much more esoteric. A "C++ monolith" allows me to potentially bypass a lot of this deployment stuff because it could serve lots (millions) of users from a single bo…
I run a Dockerized monolithic application in ECS, and I'll be switching to Kubernetes soon. I am 100% sold on this approach and will never go back to any deployment methods that I've used in the past (Capistrano, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Saltstack, etc.)
I use Convox [1] which makes everything extremely simple and easy to set up on any Cloud provider. They have some paid options, but their convox/rack [2] project is completely free and open source. I manage everything from the command-line and don't use their web UI. It's just as easy as Heroku:
convox rack install aws production
convox apps create my_app
convox env set FOO=bar
convox deploy
convox rack params set Private=true
I run a simple monolithic application where I build a single Docker image, and I run this in multiple Docker containers across 3+ EC2 instances. This has made it incredibly easy to maintain 100% uptime for over 2 years. There were a few times where I've had to fix some things in CloudFormation or roll back a failed deploy, but I've never had any downtime.
My Docker images would be much smaller and faster if I built my backend server with C++ or Rust instead of Ruby on Rails. But I would absolutely still package a C++ application in a Docker image and use ECS / Kubernetes to manage my infrastructure. I think the main benefit of Docker is that you can build and re-use consistent images across CI, development, staging, and production. So all of my Debian packages are exactly the same version, and now I spend almost zero time trying to debug strange issues that only happen on CI, etc.
So now I already know I want to use Docker because of all these benefits, and the next question is just "How can I run my Docker containers in production?". Kubernetes just happens to be the best option. The next question is "What's the easiest way to set up Docker and Kubernetes?" Convox is the holy grail.
The application language or framework isn't really relevant to the discussion.
[2] https://github.com/convox/rack
P.S. Things move really fast in this ecosystem, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some other really good options. But Convox has worked really well for me over the last few years.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#574Main 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…
> The real alternative is not doing the whole microservices thing and just deploying a single statically linked, optimized C++ server that can serve 10k requests per second from a toaster--but we're not ready to have that discussion.
The alternative is to have a old and boring cluster of X identical java nodes which host the entire backend in a single process... The deployment is done by a pedestrian bash script from a Jenkins. It used to work fine for too long I guess and folks couldn't resist "inventing" microservices to "disrupt" it.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#575Main 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 am ready! NetBSD is running on the toaster. I think haproxy can do 10K req/s. tcpserver on the backends. I only write robust shell scripts, short and portable. As a spectator, not a tech worker who uses these popular solutions, I would say there seems to be a great affinity amongst in the tech industry for anything that is (relatively) complex. Either that, or the only solutions people today can come up with are co…
> because it is not being used by well-known tech company and not being worked on by large numbers of people, it would not be newsworthy.
And at this point the hobbyist might wonder, "why isn't my toaster software being used by well-known companies? where are the pull requests to add compatibility for newer toaster models?"
> As a spectator, not a tech worker who uses these popular solutions, I would say there seems to be a great affinity amongst in the tech industry for anything that is (relatively) complex.
I think you have it backwards. General/abstract solutions (like running arbitrary software with a high tolerance for failure) have broad appeal because they address a broad problem. Finding general solutions to broad problems yields complexity, but also great value.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Kubernetes is for orchestrating a distributed system. No it's not. You can use it to run bunch of monoliths too. K8s provides a common API layer that all of your organisation can adhere to. Just like containers are a generic encapsulation of any runable code.
Sure, but you could just use plain Docker for the monolith. Containerization isn't the issue. If you're not orchestrating and connecting an array of services, what's the value add of K8s?
Standardization of deployment logic, configuration management, networking, rbac policies, ACL rules, etc etc. across on-prem or any cloud provider.
I can leave my current job, jump into a new one and start providing value within less than couple of days. Compared that to spending weeks if not months trying to understand their special snowflake of an infrastructure solving the same problems already solved a million times before.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kubernetes is for orchestrating a distributed system. What I was suggesting is to (1) make a monolith and (2) make it fast, light and high-throughput. The goal of your service is to reliably serve users at scale; this is just another way of doing it, just much more esoteric. A "C++ monolith" allows me to potentially bypass a lot of this deployment stuff because it could serve lots (millions) of users from a single bo…
> A "C++ monolith" allows me to potentially bypass a lot of this deployment stuff No it doesn't. Let's assume you write that application as a C++ monolith. Congratulations, you now have source code that could potentially serve 10k users on a toaster... If only you could get it onto that toaster. How are you going to start the databases it needs? How are you going to restart it when it crashes, or worse: When it still…
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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#578One thing I've discovered when hiring people is if I'm not using things like kubernetes, I don't get (as many) candidates apply. I also don't get as good quality candidates, either.
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
It depends. If you want to be a successful indie company, avoid cloud and distributed like the plague. If you want to advance in the big corp career ladder, user Kubernetes with as many tiny instances and micro-services as you can. "Oversaw deployment of 200 services on 1000 virtual servers" sounds way better than "started 1 monolithic high-performance server". But the resulting SaaS product might very well be the sa…
recently talked to a non-SV software developer friend: yeah, I killed two days making a window show up on top of all others on ubuntu with QT (under KDE, so, a supported business-configuration...). After telling him that this is a standard-feature of most X windows managers and asking, whether he used Wayland (didn't know), we went into functionality. "Yeah, you can enter a command and execute it on a remote machine" - "isn't that what ssh is for and you can do with a 20 line shell-script"" - "Yeah maybe, but some management type developed it, while he was still a grunt so we have to keep it...". I bet, said management type is still bragging about how he introduced convenient remote command execution by writing a QT app and his own server (or maybe he's using telnet...).
Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I only use AWS when consulting customers prefer it.
I get a lot of mileage serving a lot of content for several domains on a free Google Cloud Platform f1 micro instance. I also prefer GCP when I need a lot of compute for a short time.
Hetzner has always been my choice when I need more compute for a month or two. For saving money for VPSs OVH and DO have also been useful but I don’t use them very often.