Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
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Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#2I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it.
The unpredictability of cost is actually the prime reason we stuck to our own cloud, where we rent (technically we buy the hardware that the company hosts, but it’s not really ours, we just use it till it breaks) the iron at a known rate. Which is just better for a public sector budget than paying by mileage, at least if anyone outside of the IT department bothers to look into what they are signing off on.
The really interesting part will be where we go from here. Moving from self-hosted to rented iron that we run our virtual servers on, was a fairly simple move that would be easy to reverse. The move into the cloud is even easier, but unless you’re careful, it could be very costly to get out.
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#3This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up.
Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#4This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up. Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"
From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand.
I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenges greater than maintaining, observing, and modifying a Rube Goldberg machine of managed AWS services?
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#5This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up. Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"
From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…
"Any sufficiently complicated deployment and application management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Kubernetes."
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#6I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I’m by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big tech companies, isn’t it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that, but you can easily run into the same predicament without it. The unpredictability of cost is actually t…
Renting the hardware is not necessarily a cost-saving measure though: how much of the compute/storage capacity you have is sitting idle in your datacenter? That's the whole point of finops: you need to have full visibility into the usage of your infrastructure so you can optimize the spend.
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#7This article is written from the perspective of companies that failed to plan for kubernetes and just used it willie nillie. So... pointless.
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#8"Less than 25 per cent of those surveyed said they could accurately predict how much they’d spend on Kubernetes to within 5 per cent of actual cost."
The premise seems off to me. Of course people have a hard time predicting the cost of an autoscaling infrastructure that they haven't had for a long time.
Presumably they moved off of a fixed size infrastructure to get to Kubernetes. Where they were either paying for excess capacity on some days, or paying in the form of poor performance when demand exceeded supply.
Five percent accuracy seems like a high bar, and you would want a year or two to understand your seasonality and growth rate, etc.
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#9This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up. Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"
From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…
There is a large amount of stuff to learn about how to do stuff the kubernetes way but yea, it's just a tool to run isolated processes across a fleet of servers. You can make a mess in ec2 and in kubernetes and I don't see much if any additional complexity to costs associated to running kubernetes. It is friggin gorgeous and elegant when comparing it to something like hadoop. Spark on kubernetes has been a dream compared to writing automation that used cloudera or ambari hadoop management layers.
Re: Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
#10This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up. Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of unpredictable spend"
From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could barely see or understand. I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity there. But are these challenge…
Had the exact same experience. Was planning to use Ansible until it became obvious that Kubernetes was a perfect match, and it was fairly easy to learn the basics. Getting it to run correctly within our VPC was a pain for the developer doing that part though.