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Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

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Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#621

Post by grogenaut »

fxtentacle wrote: post #518
pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's kind of why people use Google Go. No memory issues, statically linked, easy cross-compile, and it can handle 10k requests on a toaster. And yes, there is less fancy companies like one where I work where we don't use Kubernetes because it's kind of overkill if all of your production workload fits onto 2 beefy bare metal servers. I can see a point in using Docker to unify development and production environments…

Running on only 2 servers kinda risky no? Your one hardware failure during a maint on the other away from an outage.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#622

Post by neop1x »

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…

Your static app won't scale. Once your kernel is saturated with connections, once your buffers are full, you will get packets dropped. Your app may crash unexpectedly so you need to run it in an infinite loop. And of course your static example is a simple echo app or hello world. That works fine from a toaster. In the real world we use databases where every store takes a significant time to process and persist. You quickly overgrow a single server. Then you need distributed systems and a way to do versioning so you use containers and then you need an orchestrator so you pick K8S because it's most mature and there are many resources around. And then you can even do rolling updates and rollbacks. Finally you use Helm, Terraform and Terragrunt and never look back. It works surprisingly good. I lost several years by learning all this stuff, it was difficult but it was worth it. I have more visibility into everything now thanks to metrics-server, Prometheus Operator, Grafana, Loki and I have two environments so I can update deployments in one environment and test, once tested ok, I can apply to live. No surprises. No need to run 5 year old versions of software and fear updating it...

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#623

Post by everybodyknows »

baryphonic wrote: post #590
everybodyknows wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American here too -- but don't think it's reasonable to demand American spelling from the rest of the Anglophone world.

I think the downvotes are missing the point. This is a key problem with standards: sometimes they standardize around something unreasonable. And tech is already riddled with all sorts of standards which are half-implemented in n different ways. I think a better approach would be to have a specification for more robust negotiation protocols. When I see "standardisation," I already know that this means the same thing a…

Perhaps I should clarify that "demanding American spelling is unreasonable" was specific to the context of HN (or other open discussion forums with international readership).

Within say, the volunteer-maintained documentation of MDN, the tradeoffs are quite different. There, ease of reading for reference by busy coders is much more valuable relative to ease of typing up a new contribution. Frequent switches between "color" and "colour" become a time-wasting distraction.

MDN should pick a standard and insist on it. And if Ubuntu chooses to require British spelling throughout, I'd say that's good.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#624

Post by p_l »

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…

You still need quite a lot of stuff for that one, statically linked, heavily optimized C++ server. In a way, that's actually what k8s comes from ...

How do you manage deployments for that C++ monolith? How is the logging? Logrotate, log gathering and analysis? Metrics, their analysis and and display? What happens when you have software developed by others that you might also to want to deploy? (If you can run a company with only one program ever deployed, I envy you).

All of that is simplified by kubernetes by simply making all stuff follow single way - "classical" approaches tend to make Perl blush with the amount of "There is more than one way to do it" that goes on.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#625

Post by znpy »

pas wrote: post #507
Perseids wrote: post #475

Earlier 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/

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 th…

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

This.

I was in a company where devops was just a fancy marketing term, developers would shit out a new release and then it was our problem (we the system engineers / operations people) to make it work on customers' installations.

I now work as a devops engineer in a company that does devops very well. I provide all the automation that developers need to run their services.

They built it, they run it.

I am of course available for consultation and support with that automation and kubernetes and very willing to help in general, but the people running the software are now the people most right for the job: those who built it.

As I said in my other comment: it's really about fixing the abstractions and establishing a common lingo between developers and operations.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#626

Post by pojzon »

p10jkle wrote: post #489
pojzon wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are coming from old sysadmin world and you mastered unix systems architecture and software - what k8s does is very straightforward because its the same you already know. K8S is extremely complicated for huge swarm of webdevs and java developers that really reqlly dont understand how the stuff they use/code really works. K8S was supposed to decrease the need for real sysadmins but in my view it actually incre…

I think you're right for small clusters, you end up needing more sysadmins. But to manage 1000 node Kubernetes cluster, I suspect it can be done with less administration

Im managing 20000 vcpus infra both k8s and plain vms. IMHO there is no big difference there. It all depends on the tools you are using around orchestration. In my experience having good sysadmins is still the key to best infrastructure management no matter the size of the company.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#627

Post by kasey_junk »

p_l wrote: post #613
kasey_junk wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely I think the trend of writing infrastructure as yaml may be the worst part of modern ops. It’s really hard to think of a worse language for this.

Fortunately YAML is not actually necessary in k8s, and only provided as a convenience because writing JSON by hand (or Proto3, lol) is annoying verging on insane. We can build higher level abstractions easily having a schema to target and we can build them in whatever we want. That's a big boon for me :)

For kubernetes thats absolutely true and I think more people should do that (disclaimer I work with this https://github.com/stripe/skycfg daily). I think it actually would be easier for people to understand the k8s system if they did.

But, yaml is now everywhere in the ops space. Config management systems use it, metrics systems use it, its the defacto configuration format right now and that is unfortunate cause its bad.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#628

Post by verdverm »

lima wrote: post #553
verdverm wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the most asinine thing (borrowing from Rob Pike) is to have a system where invisible characters define the scope and semantics of what you are writing. Now Helm takes this one step further (and I one beyond that before saying no more to myself and discovering https://cuelang.org ) and starts using text interpolation with helpers for managing indentation in this invisibly scoped language. I hacked in imports, bu…

Recently migrated my company's k8s product to Cue and it's pure bliss. Configuration should be data, not code. Cue has just the right amount of expressivity - anything more complex shouldn't be done at the configuration layer, but in the application or a separate operator.

What's the k8s product?

Are you on the newer syntax? #StyleDefs

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#629

Post by pjmlp »

jason0597 wrote: post #568
Perseids wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus, there's a great desire to go for an utopian future cleaning up all that's wrong with current tech. This [...] is the case with Rust [...]. Starting over is easier and more fun than fixing your shit. The domain I'm working in might be non-representative, but for me fixing my shit systematically means switching from C++ to Rust. The problems the borrow checker addresses come up all time either in the form of se…

Have you tried modern C++ before switching to rust? Or were you already using it and it didn't provide all the necessary features?

I am all for modern C++, and although I like Rust, C++ is more useful for my line of work.

However, it doesn't matter how much modern we make C++, if you don't fully control your codebase, there is always going to exist that code snippet written in C style.

Re: Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?

#630

Post by pjmlp »

waheoo wrote: post #617
jason0597 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried modern C++ before switching to rust? Or were you already using it and it didn't provide all the necessary features?

Does it have a borrow checker?

In the form of static analysis, lifetime checker.
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