Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

zwischenzugs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 112 posts

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#71

Post by jacques_chester »

jrudolph wrote: post #59

> EKS (like all AWS services) is heavily integrated with AWS IAM. As most people know, IAM is the true source of AWS lock-in This one thousand times over. Lots of companies have multi-cloud on their strategy but when it's time to actually implement it they find that the cost to adopt hyperscaler #2 is just the same or even more as they spent on integrating hyperscaler #1. While Kubernetes makes workloads portable bet…

I work at Pivotal, we have both Kubernetes (PKS) and Cloud Foundry (PAS) offerings. With Cloud Foundry we abstracted away the IaaS pretty much entirely, including IAM and SSO, for the reasons you outline (and were doing so before Kubernetes existed). We also went out of our way to make "give the developer an account" as easy as possible. I worked in Pivotal Labs before moving to R&D; the ease of just getting something running on CF vs the various homegrown platforms I encountered was just amazing and was part of why I switched divisions.

This kind of generalised, simplified capability is quickly emerging for Kubernetes too. Knative is such an effort (we contribute there too), there are many others. What has typically been missing, in my view, is an understanding that different roles need different things from a platform. Kubernetes kinda blurs the business of being an operator with being a developer.

That's fine at a small scale. It's also workable, including some automation, at large scale if you trust everyone. But there are lots of folks in the middle who are at large scale who can't just let anyone do anything they like. They need crisp boundaries between developers and operators which are safe and easy to traverse. You also need top-to-bottom multi-tenancy with no way to opt out, which is not yet a thing to vanilla Kubernetes.

In any case, I don't think AWS is going to be wiped out by Kubernetes. But taking a counterfactual view, it seems plausible that the introduction of Kubernetes has flattened their lockin trajectory and hence reduced their long term profits as an area under the curve.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#72

Post by OJFord »

neatcoder wrote: post #26
newaccoutnas wrote: post #6

I'm not really following, perhaps it's too early here. AWS is a cloud provider, Kubernetes is container orchestration software. Here's a crazy thing, we do K8S on AWS.

Exactly! This looks like an apples vs. oranges comparison.

It's apple corer vs. fruit basket.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#73

Post by k__ »

k__ wrote: post #63

Is this some kind of DevOps joke I'm too serverless to understand?

I mean, seriously.

AWS has EKS and as far as I know, it added many K8s features to ECS in the last years. So even if you are one of the unlucky people who is locked in by containers, there are plenty of options to run K8s managed and unmanaged on AWS.

This discussion sounds like some taxi driver who insists on only driving a taxi build by themselves instead of buying a car build in large volume production.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#74

Post by ngrilly »

thefounder wrote: post #3
whoisjuan wrote: post #2

I disagree. The only reason for AWS slow adoption of Kubernetes was because they couldn't find a strong use-case within their customer base. Customers knew they wanted to use it, but they really didn't know how or why it would be better than using other type of container architecture. AWS doesn't build services for customers to toy around. Every new service is a significant investment so the data and the use cases ne…

Bollocks! AWS has had few horses(i.e aws ECS) in this race so they waited to see if they can win. Obviously K8 wins over ECS so now they have no choice but embrace K8. The last thing Amazon wants is to be easy replaceable with a different provider. I guess this is same with the underdogs as well(i.e Google/Microsoft) and that's why they do all they can to lock you in with proprietary services(i.e Appengine, Datastore…

There is some lock-in with Google Datastore, but not with App Engine, at least with the new "standard environment" based on gVisor. I run perfectly standard Go or Python HTTP services.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#75

Post by throw2016 »

This illustrates the confusion around infrastructure and apps by 'devops' in a rather telling way. It's a bit like comparing Mysql or Postgresql and Aurora. Both give you databases and even some builtin replication technology but only one gives you databases plus availability and scalability out of the box.

Without that you would have to engineer your own distributed architecture and actually have the infrastructure in terms of bandwidth, regions, networking and data centers to scale to.

AWS gives you availability and scalability out of the box. Usually only a cloud provider can give you that with physical infrastructure in multiple regions, bandwidth, networking, things like floating ips, replicated storage and in the case of things like Aurora architecture and engineering. Kubernetes is a container orchestration application.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#76

Post by scarface74 »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #17
zwischenzug wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's using AWS as a VM and VPC provider. AWS don't want you to do that, or at least, that's not how they'd like you to use their services (IMO).

I think it's pretty clear that AWS is happy for you to use their services in all manner of ways, using heavy AWS-proprietary services or not. Nothing wrong particular with "lift-and-ship" as they call it when you migrate on on-prem app mostly unchanged. At least this is my impression.

Of course they would love for you to do a lifts and shift, it makes them more money than if you are “cloud native”.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#77

Post by scarface74 »

danw1979 wrote: post #65

> Interestingly, the reasons AWS put forward for why private clouds fail will be just as true for themselves: enterprises can’t manage elastic demand properly, whether it’s in their own data centre or when they’re paying someone else. This really rings true with me. I feel like Amazon aren't doing enough to tackle this problem though.... Does anyone else find the standard AWS tools for demand scaling to be like worki…

No. Lambda, DynamoDB, autoscaling read replicas on Aurora, Serverless Aurora, and even the regular old autoscaling groups are easy to automate and maintain.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#78

Post by scarface74 »

martingxx wrote: post #53
nagyf wrote: post #29

The article forgets about Azure or GCP. I know that AWS is the most popular, but you shouldn't forget about those 2. From the article it seems like there are AWS and nothing else, which is obviously not true. And Azure is backed by Microsoft, GCP is backed by Google, so if "Bezos loses his mind" there will be other alternatives besides Kubernetes.

> And Azure is backed by Microsoft, GCP is backed by Google, so if "Bezos loses his mind" there will be other alternatives besides Kubernetes. You missed the point that moving from AWS to GCP or Azure is going to be _extremely_ complex and expensive if you have used all those shiny AWS platform features. It is very easy if you are using k8s.

Sure migrations of a large complex infrastructure is easy...says no one who has actually done it.

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#79

Post by liveoneggs »

jpgvm wrote: post #39

In my experience AWS is the huge waste of time. I spent years on and off effectively building poor implementations of k8s to make AWS digestible to developers. If you work in "IT" rather than infrastructure for a large software company you might not have experienced this as internal IT is more static and easy to run on AWS/VMWare/whatever. For me k8s finally signals moving beyond that problem and onto more interestin…

I think your prediction that k8s facilitates a future where even more random developers are copy-pasting whatever they find on old blog posts into their company's production infrastructure is probably 100% correct. Sounds good I guess :)

Re: ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is the New ‘Windows vs. Linux’

#80

Post by scarface74 »

martingxx wrote: post #44
trpc wrote: post #12

while I don't really understand how ‘AWS vs. K8s’ Is related to ‘Windows vs. Linux’, I guess k8s is a threat to AWS primarily when it comes to EC2 just like it is a threat to commercial linux distros since it makes the underlying VM and host OS totally temporary and replaceable, but what can k8s do to AWS SaaSes (e.g. RDS, SNS, etc...)? almost nothing (even though it gives you the opportunity to migrate from one SaaS…

> what can k8s do to AWS SaaSes (e.g. RDS, SNS, etc...)? k8s has allowed us to not use RDS any more because we now host PostgreSQL inside k8s instead. It's a bit more overhead, but we're now portable and run in gcp too with the same k8s manifests and almost no porting effort. So yeah, we escaped the lock-in. And now we're not just tied to the AWS stuff and we're experimenting with cockroachdb and other products that…

So you “escaped lock-in” at what cost? Did you save any money up front? Did you save Developer time or do you think their time is free because they are willing to work 60 hour weeks or spending time managing infrastructure instead of adding business value?

What is the fault tolerance of your hosted Postgres solution compared to Aurora?

Post reply on HN