Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer

Post by sigstoat » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

pid-1 wrote: post #58

IMO ECS is in a weird position right now, because: 1 - It's simpler thank K8s, but not that much simpler than your avg managed K8s offering 2 - It really locks you in the AWS ecosystem 3 - It is way less used than K8s or just running things on servers, so there are way less help / learning resources I really don't see how using ECS is much better than EC2 + compose for small setups and this post didn't provide many g…

Post by pharmakom » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 5:56 PM UTC

twalla wrote: post #19

waffletower wrote: post #9

The management of infrastructure via Terraform has a hidden engineering cost that should also be considered. Engineers can much more easily maintain, learn and introspect infrastructure via Kubernetes, despite its own complexity, given the immature, inconsistent and undeniably awkward qualities of the Terraform toolchain. Engineering time is expensive -- the morass of Terraform can easily quadruple engineering effort…

As a something of a k8s maximalist, I kind of disagree here. I think, especially for early stage and smaller teams, TF ends up being "closer to the metal" in the sense that there are fewer concepts and abstractions that need to be understood before an engineer can build a model of the resources they want, how they are grouped and how state reconciliation works. With k8s you're really just trading out crappy third par…

Post by mvdtnz » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:00 PM UTC

CharlesW wrote: post #27

ljm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been exploring this lately because, honestly, the cloud is total overkill for small startups and hobby projects. Kubernetes has its value even for small scale workloads like that, but it’s still a few steps more than, say, running a Capistrano script to push your code to a small Linux box with a database on a second one. You’ll get really far on minimal resources these days, especially with cheaper ARM boxes tha…

> …the cloud is total overkill for small startups and hobby projects. It absolutely can be, sure. But solutions like Vercel, Cloudflare Workers, Supabase, etc. can be excellent and inexpensive for those use cases.

Post by pharmakom » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

pid-1 wrote: post #58

IMO ECS is in a weird position right now, because: 1 - It's simpler thank K8s, but not that much simpler than your avg managed K8s offering 2 - It really locks you in the AWS ecosystem 3 - It is way less used than K8s or just running things on servers, so there are way less help / learning resources I really don't see how using ECS is much better than EC2 + compose for small setups and this post didn't provide many g…

Post by nova22033 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #49

ljm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that right? K8S is basically another answer to Conway’s Law. Every startup I’ve worked at switched to it because then the infrastructure could map more closely to the code. Not unlike microservices at a higher level. The old-skool approach is depending on a team of SREs or sysadmins to provision hardware for you and basically handle the deployment, which K8S plus container images basically abstract away. Not to sa…

> The old-skool approach is depending on a team of SREs or sysadmins to provision hardware for you This assumes that K8s won't require a "team of SREs". My experience is you need the same amount of SREs to maintain Kubernetes, probably more, because now you have a complicated control plane, a networking nightmare, then you layer that on top of resource-contention issues, security issues, cloud provider compatibility…