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Is K8s Too Complicated? 

jmoiron.net

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Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#91

Post by [deleted] »

majewsky wrote: post #79
ownagefool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#92

Post by toomuchtodo »

majewsky wrote: post #79
ownagefool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're trading operational complexity in other areas for arguable operational functionality that CM of haproxy (or perhaps Microsoft's load balancer if you need UDP LB services) already provides for, in software that is still under active development and has sharp edges. Your systems should be as simple as possible, but no more simple than that.

Kubernetes is not turnkey and requires a significant operational time and resource commitment. Prepare accordingly.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#93

Post by zie »

justinsaccount wrote: post #84
zie wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nomad (www.nomadproject.io) is what I would recommend. Nomad is ONLY a task scheduler across a cluster of machines. Which is why it’s not rocket science, nor is it operationally complex. You say I need X cpu and X memory and I need these files out on disk(or this docker image) and run this command. It will enforce your task gets exactly X memory, X cpu and X disk, so you can’t over-provision at the task level, Docker…

> You can do load balancing and all the other things k8s does Nomad can do many of the things that k8s does, and even some things that k8s can't, but it does not do all the things that k8s does. For example, nomad doesn't have network policies. Also, just to approach the base level of functionality and security in k8s you need to setup consul as well and bootstrap all the tls stuff, and at that point it's not much mo…

Yes, True enough. Arguably, network policies are outside of Nomad's scope. It's a resource scheduler. Nomad doesn't turn up interfaces for you, or do routing of IP traffic.

Nomad is not a one-stop shop, like k8s tries to be, it does resource scheduling in a nice declarative manner, that's about it.

It's much more in the unix toolset philosophy, let 1 tool do 1 thing well, and make integration as painless as possible.

k8s is much more in-line with the systemd way of thinking, it owns all the things and can be the only shiny in the room.

I'm not sure I'd agree that turning up k8s is as easy as turning up consul, nomad and vault. K8s in my experience tends to require lots of babysitting. Consul can require some babysitting, but vault and nomad require basically no babysitting, except the occasional, mostly painless upgrade.

For me it's really about operational simplicity. I have to keep this stuff running tomorrow and next year. Shiny, super-fast moving be all and do all stuff like k8s, Openstack, etc tend to be a giant pain that requires loads of babysitting(most notably at upgrade time), as the edge cases tend to hurt a lot, when you hit them.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#94

Post by tannhaeuser »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #48
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…

K8s is not the only game in town. The question is not k8s vs. old-school ssh and apt-get, but rather k8s vs. Hashicorp Nomad or AWS Fargate. For a few microservices, Nomad is really nice and simple.

Or mesos/marathon, though I'm in no way qualified to make comparisons vs k8s.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#95

Post by user5994461 »

majewsky wrote: post #79
ownagefool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ansible gives both of that.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#96

Post by ownagefool »

majewsky wrote: post #79
ownagefool wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's the point of convention vs configuration argument but we're on the same side of the argument. :)

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#97

Post by icebraining »

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…

Aren't the K8S "distributions" like OpenShift and Rancher the infrastructure in a box?

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#99

Post by merb »

pm90 wrote: post #67
merb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if you can't use hosted k8s. what if you are on vmware 3 node (no vsphere). what if you at least need consul/etcd, postgresql, haproxy + two nodes (should be as highly available as possible). how do you keep everything up to date, how do you deploy (no downtime) without a complex ansible config. for myself I use k8s either bootkubed or kubeadm, I create ignition configs via cloud-config (coreos) and create coreo…

What did you find complex about updating k8s? Serious question since I work closely with k8s and they have a pretty fast release cycle.

running into bugs and that I need to ssh into the nodes ;) (serious answer) I can basically automate nearly everything, os updates (coreos), deployment updates (ci/cd), however updating etcd or k8s is a manual operation on bare metal, either I'm on bootkube than I need to login and update kubectl, than I need to update all daemonsets/deployments in kube-system (it's not always easy and bootkube has strange bugs, https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/bootkube/issues/977) So one should actually use kubeadm, once again I still need to update kubelet, so I need to ssh into the machine (anyway) I also need to update kubeadm and run it, again a manual operation.

*ssh means I need to do it on my own, for small clusters this can be done manually for bigger clusters it can be scripted via ansible or even better create an own software that does it. My point is, that's the only thing which is not "just works" on k8s (yet).

Edit: I also run into a bug that I could not upgrade k8s with kubeadm (but thats gonna be fixed soon: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm/issues/727) Edit2: the good thing is that reloading kubelet won't kill anything.

Re: Is K8s Too Complicated? 

#100

Post by brown9-2 »

Interesting that the article never mentions the word “container” (outside of a quoted tweet).

If you don’t want a cluster management system that can schedule your many containers over a pool of many nodes, then yes Kubernetes is not aiming to solve your problems.

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