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Is K8s Too Complicated? 

jmoiron.net

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Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#71

Post by pm90 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #57

I suppose we have to assume that we should use the right tool for the right job, and all that. And I'm sure that the Kubernetes folk know what they're doing. But I definitely think that it's too complicated without a cutting-edge Kubernetes expert in place to manage it. And even then, it's just a building block for a larger system. I've tried maybe half a dozen times to get started for relatively small workloads – le…

I’ve worked as a developer on 2 major managed k8s providers. Using k8s is easy but operating it is not. The biggest reason is that every cloud provider is using different underlying technologies to deploy k8s clusters. See for example all the different kinds of ingress controllers.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#72

Post by noonespecial »

The best tools work at multiple levels and operator skills. Imagine a tool that can do everything from pound in a nail to launch a spacecraft. In an ideal situation, a carpenter can grab it and pound some nails and a rocket scientist can launch a Mars mission with it.

In the worst case, the tool forces you to learn how to launch spacecraft before you can pound nails.

In my limited experience (having twice now made attempts to get up to speed and actually accomplish something with K8s) it felt an awful lot like learning rocketry to pound nails. I may have had an entirely different experience if I had come looking to do a moon shot.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#73

Post by oso2k »

hacknat wrote: post #5

Right tool for the right job. Is K8s too complicated? For some use cases it is. They probably should do a better job of discouraging certain use cases, but calling their elevator pitch “bullshit” is hyperbolic. There are exceptions to every rule, but a good rule of thumb is cluster size. If you’re managing less than 25 servers than K8s is probably over kill. As you start to creep north of 40 servers K8s really starts…

Or find someone to train you. The Kubernetes stack is deep. There's no shame in being taught this stuff. Nobody is born already knowing all the nuances.

As an OpenShift consultant for Red Hat, in a single day, I've run a tcpdump trace to figure out why a particular NFS vendor had trouble with traffic over a new network vlan, then, spent an hour or two with a Dev in ChromeDevTools to help them get session management cookies straightened out. Some people call that a day spent as a "Full Stack Engineer", I call that Tuesday. And I can't tell you how many obscure corner case scenarios I've found bugs in Kubernetes, OpenShift or a client's App.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#74

Post by pm90 »

perlgeek wrote: post #33

Suppose I'm an application developer who is only interested in infrastructure because there needs to be some to run my stuff. In this scenario, would I actually learn Kubernetes, or would it make more sense to go to straight to a PaaS solution? Like OpenShift (which uses k8s in the backend, I believe), or Cloud Foundry, Stackato etc. I always get the impression that k8s has a lot of good ideas, but doesn't provide ev…

You should start with a managed solution and see if it makes sense to write/move your code in k8s. If it does, awesome, keep using the managed solution. Roll your own only when you see your traffic/load increasing your costs to prohibitive levels or if you want to do something very unique.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#75

Post by tarr11 »

__float wrote: post #41
tarr11 wrote: post #11

If you follow that link on Twitter, there are a lot of reasonable answers to his (rhetorical?) question - "In a single tweet — can you name a technical benefit you and your team have gained by switching to Kubernetes?" "Sensible configuration, fast deployments, awesome community, and flexible control plane...among others" "single root of truth for configuration" "predictable deploys" "Standardized orchestration, whic…

The linked tweet wasn't this blog post's author, and the tweet author uses she/her pronouns. Gentle reminder that people of all genders are present in tech, and we should be mindful of potential exclusivity when assuming everyone is a man :)

Fair enough (though i was referring to the blog author, not the tweet author, but could see how that could be confusing given the nested references)

The tweet author seemed sincere in their desire to answer that question, whereas the blog author seemed to be quoting it ironically (eg, he felt there are no ways to express k8s values in a tweet)

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#76

Post by markbnj »

jaequery wrote: post #10

what are some of the downsides of K8? any horror stories?

After three years of running it in production I don't really have any horror stories, but we have definitely run into odd and puzzling things. For example, when we were experimenting with auto-scaling node-pools on GKE, and the cluster would scale a node-pool up then fail to scale it back down due to the fact that there are daemonsets on every node of a GKE cluster, and this left it in a state where it flopped back and forth between two nodes every ten minutes, evicting the entire workload, trying to delete the node, failing, and resetting.

Thing is, we have also run into really bad things in our puppeted infrastructure that we run on vms and manage with terraform. Like the time I accidentally ran a command in the wrong folder and deleted 120 vms :). Well maybe that was just me and a deficiency of our tooling, but anyway one thing is for sure: k8s makes it far easier to recover from situations that arise, once you understand what the problem is and update the cluster with the right state, the controllers will set things right.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#77

Post by sytse »

The OP linked to a set tweets from Joe Beda (author of Kubernetes) that read "When you create a complex deployment system with Jenkins, Bash, Puppet/Chef/Salt/Ansible, AWS, Terraform, etc. you end up with a unique brand of complexity that you are comfortable with. It grew organically so it doesn't feel complex."

Kubernetes is a convention over configuration framework for operations. And by doing that it allows you to easily build on its abstractions.

At GitLab the Kubernetes abstractions allowed is to make Auto DevOps that automatically builds, runs tests, checks performance, diagnoses security, and provisions a review app. We could have made that with gitLab CI and bash but it would be much harder for people to understand, maintain, and extend.

Having an abstraction for a deployment is something that doesn't even come by default with Jenkins as far as I know. Now that we have that as an industry we can finally build the next step of tools with the usability of Heroku but the control, price, flexibility, and extensibility of self-hosted software.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#79

Post by majewsky »

ownagefool wrote: post #15
hacknat wrote: post #5

Right tool for the right job. Is K8s too complicated? For some use cases it is. They probably should do a better job of discouraging certain use cases, but calling their elevator pitch “bullshit” is hyperbolic. There are exceptions to every rule, but a good rule of thumb is cluster size. If you’re managing less than 25 servers than K8s is probably over kill. As you start to creep north of 40 servers K8s really starts…

I'd say it's actually just a convention vs configuration argument. Kubernetes isn't giving you anything you couldn't have already built with configuration management. It just happens to a standard written by a bunch of people with a background in the problem domain. Personally, I think the abstractions are thoughtful and the system isn't really inherently more complicated than what you'll eventually build anyways, bu…

> Kubernetes isn't giving you anything you couldn't have already built with configuration management.

Configuration management does not give you loadbalancing. Configuration management does not give you rolling upgrades.

I mean, sure, you can do this stuff with CM as well, but with k8s, there's nothing to build. It's already there

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