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Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

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Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#71

Post by jobegrabber »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #52
0des wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they put the word Critical in there because it is the name of the website.

Ah.. My bad I did not get that, I guess then this is merely an issue of semantic overlap then. Either way I get that I was pendantic.

Even with a CS background, I would expect a blog post that is supposed to be a "A Critical Review" to at least try to be fair and reasonable.

It doesn't have to be neutral in my opinion. But it should clearly separate personal judgement or opinion from facts and overall rational.

In the "About me" section the author says:

>Originally I started this site attacking the big corporate interests (Google, IBM and VMWare) that drove this effort forward, but that really doesn’t speak to my intended audience. It also came off as acerbic, which I am fine with in regards to corporations and their CEOs, it does not do justice to all the engineers that slaved over the Kubernetes project. So I deleted those posts. Now, I just want to start, provoke, prod, or push a dialog forward, because if you just follow the tech blogs, you would think we should be running a Kubernetes cluster on our lawn mowers.

Even if the blog is not about simply "attacking the big corporate interests" anymore, the language clearly puts forward the post's agenda.

In my opinion, the post should have a different title, one that is clearly indicating the author's intention to highlight the negative things about Kubernetes and the documentary.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#72

Post by Eritico »

arianvanp wrote: post #9
tombh wrote: post #5

> especially [a code base] as shit as Kubernetes I completely agree that Kubernetes is best understood through the lens of Google's corporate interests. But 1. resorting to language like "shit" makes me question the writer's credentials and reliability and 2. the code base may not be exemplary but its quality is far from belonging to the poorer end of the known spectrum.

Given that contributors have been referring to the kubernetes codebase as "the clusterfuck" in talks I think it's fine to say "shit". https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/kubernetesclu... It's a great talk to figure out how the kubernetes codebase works

This was 3 years ago and it even provides a solution in that talk already. Have you rechecked your assumption or are you only arguing from a talk from 2019?

Índependent of this, the abstraction layer (k8s api, kinds etc.) is independent of the code base btw. You can easily refactor and fix all issues in k8s. The abstraction is already there.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#73

Post by dijonman2 »

Eritico wrote: post #67
jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you still have to do that in Kubernetes, unless you are running Fargate. Someone has to provision and maintain that machine, and in the process introduce a ton of administrative overhead.

Its not the same. You can easily run node pools automatically because your abstraction layer is k8s with containerd or docker. You also know that you can throw away VMs because they don't contain any state. You are not losing data just because you kill a VM or a VM breaks. It is way easier to just spin up n nodes and provision them all equally than whatever you did before. In my team, we can manage way way way more n…

I think there is a healthy dose of anti-vm bias in your viewpoints.

Lauding Kubernetes because ops work took too much of your time is just shifting your burden elsewhere, even if that means paying a bit more for an offering like ECS fargate.

Any environment with configuration management can treat instances as ephemeral. It’s a best practice.

I view docker more as a package manager, no more dependency hell.

In any event K8s is sprawling, it will soon be too complex for its own good. Assuming it’s not already.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#74

Post by p_l »

goodpoint wrote: post #17
sovietmudkipz wrote: post #12

I regularly listen to the kubernetes podcast run by Google employees. Through time and through various guest interviews I've gotten the impression that some (most?) who created borg/kubernetes did basically all of the work that Docker did creating containers but are upset Docker has all that recognition. I can't quite articulate it but it seems like the Googlers are super judgmental and want to snub their noses at Do…

Most of the heavy lifting to implement containers was done by the kernel developer community and projects like LXC. Yet, docker and kubernetes are very much hype/marketing driven and took away a lot of recognition from the kernel developers.

A non trivial chunk of kernel work for containers was upstreaming of Google kernel patches.

To the point of a throwdown on LKML when Lennart tried to "lay claim" to cgroups v2 as "owned solely by systemd", and got a rather... Funny response.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#75

Post by p_l »

vishvananda wrote: post #39

I'm surprised that neither the documentary nor the review gets into the legacy of OpenStack. I may be biased, but it seems to me that a huge amount of the success of kubernetes is directly attributable to OpenStack. First, OpenStack paved the way for a bunch of companies to invest real money in working together to compete with AWS. Second, there was massive turnover in ~2013 in open source contributors from OpenStack…

I suspect the documentary might have not wanted to thrash talk OpenStack.

Let's be honest, a non trivial push for k8s was just how badly Open Stack sucked

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#76

Post by throwaway894345 »

jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #18
danpalmer wrote: post #15

I'm not sure this was authored in full good faith. Things like dismissing Kubernetes attempts to "abstract away the servers" as being pointless because we already had virtualisation is at best ignorance of the differences, and at worst, gaslighting. It's clear that the author doesn't like Kubernetes, and to be honest this documentary is unlikely to change their mind because they are not the target audience. All the "…

Hi danpalmer, I kind of hit on this in the article. How do you think abstracting away the server adds any value in "public cloud"? Where you can get bespoke VMs, with no concern for the underlying hardware? Can you elaborate?

With Kubernetes you don't have to configure log exfiltration, process management, SSH, host metrics, etc. You don't have to touch Ansible--there's no host management at all.

The stuff that you still have to configure (e.g., firewalls, NFS) is all configured through a consistent, declarative interface (Kubernetes manifests) rather than a dozen bespoke, byzantine formats or imperative commands.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#77

Post by Eritico »

jasonrichardsmi wrote: post #68
Eritico wrote: post #61

Its just a very bad and uneducated stand from some person. I'm running a small k8s instance at home, for a small startup and at my job in a big version. Abstraction of VMs is a real benefit: Have you ever had to restart a VM because of some security issues? Yes? Were you worried that your server comes up again? With k8s, you know that 1. its cloud native to a certain extend. It will come up again because it came up b…

I am sorry you feel that way. The point of the article was not really attempting to address the feature sets of Kubernetes (which I also have issues with), it was really about the sales pitch being delivered by Google. I have A LOT of issues with the things you posted above, and I hope to address them in future articles. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for reading.

I still don't get your motivation on writing your criticism.

What is your endgoal? Getting people not to like k8s? Because you don't like to work with it?

To push people away from k8s?

How do you add value to the current infrastructure/platform ecosystem by 'hating' on it without providing something different?

Of course companies present this k8s story as a successful thing. Why would that documentary be negative?

And while you have 'A LOT of issues with the things you posted above' just to be clear: For me and a lot of other people who like kubernetes, it solves real problems, its a great choice and there are of course things which need to be optimized. But if you only rant about it in the next blog post from you, i'm not seeing any value you really add to the ecosystem.

For me, i never seen anything like kubernetes in the last 12 years. I can get certified k8s from many companies in many different forms (gke, aks, aws, digitalocean, ranger, rke2, k3s, minicube, microk8s). ArgoCD is a dream come true.

Can you do it differently with other tools? Yes sure, did we ever had something like k8s before? no. We never had that holistic view on Infrastructure in such a FOSS project.

Again what do you want to achieve? A real discussion on specific issues or just hating against something? Or doyou have the feeling that the blog posts writing about k8s are to one sided?

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#78

Post by zozbot234 »

darkwater wrote: post #56

On one side there are the Kubernetes corporate enthusiasts that are probably exactly doing what this post i saying: try to remove the advantage that AWS has over all the other vendors. On the other, we are also plagued by AWS shills/fanbase that hate Kubernetes exactly because of that (they are trying to push you toward serverless with Lambda). In the middle ground there is probably the truth, where AWS had a program…

> they are trying to push you toward serverless with Lambda

With bare metal code written in modern memory-safe languages, serverless/FaaS could easily become a cross-cloud abstraction much like k8s. AIUI, there are already some experiments along these lines. It turns out that the main cloud services differ slightly in how they account for resource utilization, etc. in serverless deployments, but not in a way that would make a cross-cloud abstraction useless.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#79

Post by zozbot234 »

herodoturtle wrote: post #60

> It also makes me think if OSS is created solely to promote profit margins, is that really good OSS, or just a tactic to wrap strategy in a thin veneer of altruism? Is that not a false dichotomy? Kubernetes could promote profit margins for Google whilst simultaneously being good for OSS. Sure, if Kubernetes was touted purely as being about what's good for OSS, then that would be disingenuous. But throughout the docu…

> Kubernetes could promote profit margins for Google whilst simultaneously being good for OSS.

Yup, a typical "commoditize complements" dynamic. Google/Azure's cloud services do not implement AWS's existing API's and ways to interact with the platform, so they address this by making an alternative available.

Re: Kubernetes Documentary: A Critical Review

#80

Post by wyufro »

mahathu wrote: post #20
danpalmer wrote: post #15

I'm not sure this was authored in full good faith. Things like dismissing Kubernetes attempts to "abstract away the servers" as being pointless because we already had virtualisation is at best ignorance of the differences, and at worst, gaslighting. It's clear that the author doesn't like Kubernetes, and to be honest this documentary is unlikely to change their mind because they are not the target audience. All the "…

What does gaslighting mean in this context? I thought it meant making the "victim" question their own sanity/perception of reality?

Before I learnt what it really means I always imagined it as a blowtorch heating things up, which sort of fits the original but obviously has a much wider scope. So maybe GP has the same idea I had.
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