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

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

#81

Post by thefounder »

ngrilly wrote: post #74
thefounder wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing with Appengine is that even if you run the standard env(which is more expensive and has some limitations) you are highly likely to use Datastore and other proprietary services that are tightly integrated in the appengine environment. The whole thing feels like a bait to lock-in, just like the initial pricing which went off-rails.

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

#82

Post by languagehacker »

I think this is the analogy folks who really want to hang their hat on K8s would like to force. It feels familiar, and it helps justify the tremendous personal investment of time it takes for running your own K8s cluster with high uptime. The usual adage that "free software is only free if your time is of no value" really does apply here.

Assuming you're writing code that lives happily inside of a container, and assuming that you're not taking advantage of anything else AWS has to offer (which is increasingly improbable), moving from ECS to EKS or GKE isn't a big deal if you need the additional configurability that real Kubernetes offers.

Personally, I like running things on Fargate-style containers so I can keep things as serverless as possible.

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

#83

Post by CyanLite4 »

AWS will be around in 5 years. It has an established business model making billions of dollars per year.

K8s won’t be around in 5 years. It’s peaking towards the top of the hype cycle. If you’re wondering about cloud lock-in, then you don’t get the power of the cloud.

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

#84

Post by thefounder »

Blackstone4 wrote: post #23
thefounder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops Google from open sourcing Datastore, or AWS from open sourcing dynamoDB? These cloud providers with proprietary services are the new Oracle. They are actually worse than Oracle b/c they can cut off your access to your database in seconds. Google open sourced k8 so that they can get a pie from AWS and then lock you in with other proprietary services.

> What stops Google from open sourcing Datastore, or AWS from open sourcing dynamoDB? They have invested millions into creating cloud software. If they open source it, what is stopping other firms from taking that software and creating their own cloud offering? Would you work for free? Would you open source all the work you have done?

They are also using millions worth of open source software.

Why would they open source it? To provide a way out to customers. They don't even provide a mongo-like license.

I can't forget a session at Google I/O how they were insisting that appengine is not open source because we are too dumb to understand it....yeah sure what about k8, now? I can run it on my Mac, I even contributed few commits.

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

#85

Post by peterwwillis »

It's an imperfect analogy so we're all going to take what we want from it. Here's my take:

Windows enabled businesses to start doing business without a ton of r&d. It was ubiquitous and supported and functional.

At the same time, with Linux you could invest all your capex into a datacenter and 1Us and build clusters for cheap and transfer all that money you would have spent on a complete system on opex to develop one. In some cases it's just plain necessary, and has some great success stories.

Sadly, I'm seeing a lot of businesses throw away time and money on NIH, justifying it with restrictive budgets. They claim they have to build all their solutions from scratch, rather than pay for managed ones, because it's cheaper. Those people often don't understand the true cost, and are wasting both time and money, when they could be buying ready solutions to start churning out products.

But then again, there are businesses that literally do not need to move fast, improve their products, increase efficiency, etc. For them, spending money on tech is more a hedge against an uncertain future than a business decision. They'll invest in anything if they think it makes them relevant.

So, Windows vs Linux is probably less important than the underlying motives of a given business, and whether it's managed well. Anyway, neither of them disappeared, and there's still good cases for both.

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

#86

Post by tstrimple »

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…

> But for developers in big co., acquiring a public cloud account may take months and forms over forms of paperwork, getting roles put into the central corporate directory etc.

I help companies re-architect their solutions for the cloud, and I've worked with companies who had a multi-month process for requesting and provisioning new "cloud servers". If it takes you just as long with just as much overhead to deploy a VM in Azure as it does to buy and provision a physical server, why are you even moving to the cloud?

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

#87

Post by thefounder »

StreamBright wrote: post #24
thefounder wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AWS no other choice? I am not sure if you are following what AWS does (like for example the MongoDB story). >> 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 etc). Datastore has S3 API and it is trivial to replace…

Datastore can't have an S3 API and is not easily replaceable. You linked to a different product(Cloud Storage).

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

#88

Post by navd »

solatic wrote: post #70
sklarsa wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use helm? I'm looking into spinning up (and eventually productionizing) a k8s cluster at my job and I was leaning towards using helm since some pieces that I was thinking about using are installed via helm charts ( https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx for example)

If you use third-party Helm charts, you eventually need to add onto the generated objects in a way which the chart doesn't support, and then you're up a creek without a paddle. This is precisely the use case which Kustomize tries to fix and it was the only real strength which Helm had to begin with (i.e. the ease of installing third-party software on your cluster). In the meantime, because you must install Helm into…

I thought it would be useful to add that you can also generate k8s manifests from a helm chart using the `helm template` command.

I'm in the same boat where I avoid helm if at all possible.

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

#89

Post by navd »

CyanLite4 wrote: post #83

AWS will be around in 5 years. It has an established business model making billions of dollars per year. K8s won’t be around in 5 years. It’s peaking towards the top of the hype cycle. If you’re wondering about cloud lock-in, then you don’t get the power of the cloud.

I disagree, I think k8s is entering the slope of enlightenment. The ecosystem is still early, but there are some amazing tools being built that can make you very productive.

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

#90

Post by ngrilly »

thefounder wrote: post #81
ngrilly wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing with Appengine is that even if you run the standard env(which is more expensive and has some limitations) you are highly likely to use Datastore and other proprietary services that are tightly integrated in the appengine environment. The whole thing feels like a bait to lock-in, just like the initial pricing which went off-rails.

The new version of the Standard Environment removed most limitations (and you can still use the Flex Environment when required):

https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-enviro...

And using the proprietary App Engine API is not recommended anymore: “We strongly recommend using the Google Cloud client library or third party libraries instead of the App Engine-specific APIs.” (source: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/go111/go-di...)

You can use App Engine with a standard MySQL or PostgreSQL database and S3-compatible object storage.

Like you, I used to avoid App Engine because of lock-in, but they radically improved things with gVisor.

Yet, I agree about the price, especially with the Flex Environment compared to standard Compute Engine :-(

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