Why is Kubernetes getting so popular? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#591

Post by nikon » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #245

wolco wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why run it at all? The cost must be 10 times more this way. It is mostly for the fun of learning. I come from the opposite approach. I have 4 servers two digital ocean $5 and two vulr $2.50 instances. One holds the db. One server as the frontend/code. One server to do heavy work and another to server a heavy site and holds backups. For $15 I'm hosting hundreds of sites, running so many background processes. I…

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.

Flux or Argo can help with this. The operator lives on your cluster, and ensures your cluster state matches a Git repo with all your configuration in it.

Flux - https://github.com/fluxcd/flux

ArgoCD - https://argoproj.github.io/argo-cd/

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#592

Post by darkwater » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

bradgessler wrote: post #341

I’ll take a shot. k8s is popular because Docker solved a real problem and Compose didn’t move fast enough to solve orchestration problem. It’s a second order effect; the important thing is Docker’s popularity. Before Docker there were a lot of different solutions for software developers to package up their web applications to run on a server. Docker kind of solved that problem: ops teams could theoretically take anyt…

> I do miss the days of ‘cap deploy’ for Rails apps.

Oh boy I do not miss them. Actually I'm still living them and I hope we can finally migrate away from Capistrano ASAP. Dynamic provisioning with autoscaling is a royal PITA with cap as it was never meant to be used on moving targets like dynamic instances.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#593

Post by vbezhenar » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:52 PM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #319

vbezhenar wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with logging in to a server? I love logging in to a server and tinkering with it. Sure, for those who operate fleets of hundreds it's not scalable, but for a few servers that's a pleasure.

The problem is when you need to duplicate that server or restore it due to some error, you have no idea what all the changes you made are. Besides, it's additional hassle and a chance for things to go wrong, the way I have it set up now is that production gets a new deployment whenever something gets pushed to master and I don't have to do anything else.

Make backup of /etc and package list. Usually that's enough to quickly replicate a configuration. It's not like servers are crashing every day. I'm managing few servers for a last 5 years and I don't remember a single crash, they just work.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#594

Post by foxhill » Sat, May 30, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

alephu5 wrote: post #541

foxhill wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Docker solved a real problem > everybody thinks they need k8s and simply cargo cult it for a simple Wordpress blog docker _also_ has this problem though. there are probably 6 people in the world that need to run one program built with gcc 4.7.1 linked against libc 2.18 and another built with clang 7 and libstdc++ at the same time on the same machine. and yes, docker "provides benefits" other than package/binary/lib…

I am a big fan of using namespaces via docker, in particular for development. If I want to test my backend component I can expose a single port and then hook it up to the database, redis, nginx etc. via docker networks. You don't need to worry about port clashes and it's easy to "factory reset". In production this model is quite a good way to guarantee your internal components aren't directly exposed too.

that's sort of my point though - namespacing is a great feature that allows for more independent & isolated testing and execution, there is no doubt. docker provides none of it.

i would argue that relying on docker hiding public visibilty of your internal components is akin to using a mobile phone as a door-stop - it'll probably work but there are more appropriate (and auditable) tools for the job.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#595

Post by collyw » Sat, May 30, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #528

101404 wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason for complexity fetishisation (great term!) is to show everybody else how amazingly smart you are. It's the infrastructure version of "clever" code.

Except to some of us it shows just the opposite.

Its starting to get depressing at my age. After nearly 20 years in the industry I think I have a knack for keeping things as "simple as necessary and no more" and managing complexity. Unfortunately interviews are full of bullshit looking at pedantic nitpicking, or stuff I learned 20 years ago in university and have never needed to use since.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#596

Post by eyberg » Sat, May 30, 2020, 4:03 PM UTC

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

Citation? In my experience companies hire more sysadmins when adopting k8s. It's trivial to point at the job reqs for it.

> Company saves money by not having to pay for managed cloud products if they don't want to

Save money?! Again citation. What are you replacing in the cloud with k8s? In my experience most companies using k8s (as you already admitted) don't have a ton of ops experience and thus use more cloud resources.

> Treating cloud providers like cattle not pets

Again. Citation? Companies go multi-cloud not because they want to but because they have different teams (sometimes from acquisition) that have pre-existing products that are hard to move. No one is using k8s to get multi-cloud as a strategy.

> It's going to eat the world (already has?).

Not it won't. It's actually on the downtrend now. Do you work for the CNCF? Can you put in a disclaimer if so?

> just deploying a single statically linked, optimized C++ server that can serve 10k requests per second from a toaster

completely un-necessary; most of the HN audience is not creating a c++ webserver from scratch; most of the HN audience can trivially serve way more than 10k reqs/sec from a single vm (node, rust, go, etc. are all easily capable of doing this from 1 vcpu)

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#597

Post by collyw » Sat, May 30, 2020, 4:04 PM UTC

saalaa wrote: post #502

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. Le…

I am still not convinced by Kubernetes, but you make a good point.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#598

Post by roman_sf » Sat, May 30, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

demosito666 wrote: post #462

roman_sf wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It is impressive how much it can orchestrate. It is also very useless in the real cloud because developers there are dealing with higher-level abstractions to solve problems for the business. The most simplistic task - execute some code in response to even in a bucket - makes kubernetes with all its sophisticated convergence capabilities completely useless. And even if somebody figures this out and puts the…

> The most simplistic task - execute some code in response to even in a bucket - makes kubernetes with all its sophisticated convergence capabilities completely useless. That's because you're not thinking web^Wcloud scale. To execute some code in response to event you need: - several workers that will poll the source bucket for changes (of course you could've used existing notification mechanism like aws eventBridge,…

Wait, I can do all these with s3 and lambda at any scale - for pennies :) Will probably take few hours to set everything up with tools like stackery.io

So once again, why developers need kubernetes for? If the most simple problem becomes a habitholy mess :)

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#599

Post by roman_sf » Sat, May 30, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #358

roman_sf wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

couldn't they shovel it into dynamodb?

Theoretically, sure. But Vitess is - as Kubernetes is - provider agnostic. But if you’re talking about the DB, sure to that too. But, not my decision.

Yeah, I've seen these resume-driven, anti-vendor-locking, everything-is-a-nail-for-kubernetes-hummer decisions :)

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#600

Post by yrro » Sat, May 30, 2020, 4:13 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #509

capableweb wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

OpenShift's web interface lets you do a lot (other alternatives are of course available). And it's quite nice being able to edit the YAML of everything via the web interface as well!