7 ms·

Why I joined Heptio

97 points by stanleydrew 9y ago

i_am_nomad 9y ago
Please, can we stop using the word "modulo" in non-mathematical contexts?
- jeeyoungk 9y ago
  thanks for your contentful comment. I'm pretty sure everyone in HN will appreciate this. "modulo" in this sense does make sense, because it's abstracting that part out and mapping it to a equivalence relation.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
shaklee3 9y ago
Does anyone know how Nomad fits in? It seems to have a lot of overlap with kubernetes, but fewer features and at the moment. Why are they working on both?
- benley 9y ago
  Heptio appears to be working on Kubernetes, not Nomad. Nomad is a Hashicorp product. Who is the "they" in your question?
  - shaklee3 9y ago
    Hah, sorry, I was getting heptio and hashicorp confused. My mistake!
new299 9y ago
This is an honest question, and not meant as a dig against any of these automation tools, as I don't work in devops but: "I remember, thinking back to when I started to use Puppet, and imagining about what it would have been like to have those tools in previous jobs, where automation involved SVN repositories full of perl scripts, and crontab entries lovingly copy pasta’d between machines" Is this really the problem people have been trying to solve? Is it that people were just using hacked together perl scripts and copying files around, then they moved to Puppet to automate this same process. And now they're moving is to containers? Because it always seemed like building your own deb or rpm was a reasonably neat, and easily deployable solution to these kinds of problems. Whenever I've had to do it, that's what I've done. I guess there are some limitations to this. But are there other compelling reasons to use containers in general?
- bboreham 9y ago
  I'm no expert in those earlier tools, but how does "building a deb" look if the app is in Python or NodeJS, say? With Docker I can take a base userland, install pip, use pip to add libraries, then add my own files, and once I've done that and created an "image" it's just a tarfile: it will unpack everywhere and run. I can do this without any expertise in pip, rpm, yum, npm, etc., etc. Just follow a couple of recipes once, and if they work then my containers always work. That's a key attraction.
  - Denzel 9y ago
    > [...] it will unpack everywhere and run. Hate to be pedantic: it will run on an OS that shares the same kernel or newer (assuming backwards compatibility). This type of "run anywhere" statement caused a lot of confusion for me re: Docker when I first started looking into it.
    - bboreham 9y ago
      This is never a problem in practice. All the syscalls for files, sockets, etc., have stayed the same for years. [edit] backstopped by Docker requiring at least 3.10
      - Denzel 9y ago
        Sure, and what of the users' applications running in the Docker container. It's just not the type of "run anywhere" I was expecting based on the marketing/hype. And the more people kept saying "package once, run anywhere" the more I began to wonder how Docker was able to accomplish that without being a VM. Short answer: they don't. I'm not saying Docker isn't valuable. It is. I just wish it was documented more readily, without having to sift through jargon, that Docker containers must run on a compatible kernel. Essentially, I found it confusing how Docker was sold as a lightweight VM.
  - lathiat 9y ago
    The thing is that writing a Dockerfile is basically the same thing as packaging a deb/rpm The difference is the language is more friendly to entry level usage. You still had to learn something. And they made 1 file-ish which traditionally most package managements weren't.
nathan_f77 9y ago
> Within the next year or two you’ll be able to buy access to a Kubernetes API server at every price point; on your laptop, shared as a VPS, in your own VPC, or even as an appliance. If Heptio can really deliver "at every price point", then this would be amazing. I just want to be able to deploy up a side project for free or very cheap, and seamlessly scale all the way up to thousands of dollars per month. Launching a side project on Heroku and AWS seems to cost a minimum of $69.00 per month. I typically need at least a hobby web and worker dyno ($7 each), Redis Micro for $5, and a Standard 0 Postgres database for $50. (Backups and continuous protection are important.) Actually, I just looked at AWS, and it's about the same price to get started. You could probably start with RDS instance on db.t2.small, for $26. And run your server and workers on a t2.medium server for $34. Maybe the only way to start from $0 is to use AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. But it would be really nice if Kubernetes was as easy to use as Heroku, and you could also start from $0 with a production-ready service.
- meesterdude 9y ago
  > Launching a side project on Heroku and AWS seems to cost a minimum of $69.00 per month. I disagree with your assessment of "minimum". the $7/mo is more than enough for starting out; enough to validate your idea and serve some customers. If you need more services, you can get a digital ocean box for $10, with less "seamless" scaling. or, move to heroku once you have validation.
  - nathan_f77 9y ago
    You're right if you're just starting out with no customers. But as soon as you get your first customer who is paying money and depending on your service, it's really important to use production-ready services.
- nogox 9y ago
  Try hyper.sh. They are the new Heroku for Docker.
  - nathan_f77 9y ago
mack1001 9y ago
Days are numbered for infra software detached from a cloud provider. Cloud Foundry and VMware folding (partnering with Google Cloud) is a good indicator that there is no clear path forward. So Kubernetes on prem or custom rolled on a cloud will not win the fight against GKE or ECS. Openstack,DC/OS, Openshift are all risky bets from a career standpoint.
- anoother 9y ago
  Some people want to know how the nuts & bolts work as opposed to putting together borrowed Lego blocks. Linux has more than proven the utility of diversely-sourced development, and Kubernetes benefits from the same right now. I'd be worried if that changed. Also, there are (and will continute to be) plenty of companies/projects that can't use public clouds for a variety of security, compliance, performance and business inertia concerns ('concerns', not necessarily 'reasons').
  - mack1001 9y ago
    In the next few years, on prem will become the exception than the rule considering that heavily regulated industries are now moving to the cloud. The same way hardware providers like HP, DELL and EMC are struggling, IMHO the next wave will be infra software providers. Unless for very specific purposes, the ROI of running your own infra software is decreasing. Edit: typo
- rdtsc 9y ago
  Or is it the other way, days of overcharging and being locked into a cloud provider are numbered since the software that runs the infrastructure is not the secret / proprietary anymore. See, can spin it either way :-)
  - mack1001 9y ago
    Small data point but the uptake of aws lambda has been crazy in spite of the clear lock-in. Similarly S3 and several other proprietary cloud services. The cost of infra software is nominal compared to what it takes to manage it and maintain high uptime.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
VMs are such a clunky workaround. Sure, lxc keeps the performance ok, but you still end up with a significant amount of redundant data. Rather than work around the limitations of Debian-like package management, I find it easier, and more worth while to just start using more advanced package managers like Guix or Nix.

Why I joined Heptio

97 points by stanleydrew 9y ago

i_am_nomad 9y ago

Please, can we stop using the word "modulo" in non-mathematical contexts?

jeeyoungk 9y ago
thanks for your contentful comment. I'm pretty sure everyone in HN will appreciate this. "modulo" in this sense does make sense, because it's abstracting that part out and mapping it to a equivalence relation.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

shaklee3 9y ago

Does anyone know how Nomad fits in? It seems to have a lot of overlap with kubernetes, but fewer features and at the moment. Why are they working on both?

benley 9y ago
Heptio appears to be working on Kubernetes, not Nomad. Nomad is a Hashicorp product. Who is the "they" in your question?
- shaklee3 9y ago
  Hah, sorry, I was getting heptio and hashicorp confused. My mistake!

new299 9y ago

This is an honest question, and not meant as a dig against any of these automation tools, as I don't work in devops but: "I remember, thinking back to when I started to use Puppet, and imagining about what it would have been like to have those tools in previous jobs, where automation involved SVN repositories full of perl scripts, and crontab entries lovingly copy pasta’d between machines" Is this really the problem people have been trying to solve? Is it that people were just using hacked together perl scripts and copying files around, then they moved to Puppet to automate this same process. And now they're moving is to containers? Because it always seemed like building your own deb or rpm was a reasonably neat, and easily deployable solution to these kinds of problems. Whenever I've had to do it, that's what I've done. I guess there are some limitations to this. But are there other compelling reasons to use containers in general?

bboreham 9y ago
I'm no expert in those earlier tools, but how does "building a deb" look if the app is in Python or NodeJS, say? With Docker I can take a base userland, install pip, use pip to add libraries, then add my own files, and once I've done that and created an "image" it's just a tarfile: it will unpack everywhere and run. I can do this without any expertise in pip, rpm, yum, npm, etc., etc. Just follow a couple of recipes once, and if they work then my containers always work. That's a key attraction.
- Denzel 9y ago
  > [...] it will unpack everywhere and run. Hate to be pedantic: it will run on an OS that shares the same kernel or newer (assuming backwards compatibility). This type of "run anywhere" statement caused a lot of confusion for me re: Docker when I first started looking into it.
  - bboreham 9y ago
    This is never a problem in practice. All the syscalls for files, sockets, etc., have stayed the same for years. [edit] backstopped by Docker requiring at least 3.10
    - Denzel 9y ago
      Sure, and what of the users' applications running in the Docker container. It's just not the type of "run anywhere" I was expecting based on the marketing/hype. And the more people kept saying "package once, run anywhere" the more I began to wonder how Docker was able to accomplish that without being a VM. Short answer: they don't. I'm not saying Docker isn't valuable. It is. I just wish it was documented more readily, without having to sift through jargon, that Docker containers must run on a compatible kernel. Essentially, I found it confusing how Docker was sold as a lightweight VM.
- lathiat 9y ago
  The thing is that writing a Dockerfile is basically the same thing as packaging a deb/rpm The difference is the language is more friendly to entry level usage. You still had to learn something. And they made 1 file-ish which traditionally most package managements weren't.

nathan_f77 9y ago

> Within the next year or two you’ll be able to buy access to a Kubernetes API server at every price point; on your laptop, shared as a VPS, in your own VPC, or even as an appliance. If Heptio can really deliver "at every price point", then this would be amazing. I just want to be able to deploy up a side project for free or very cheap, and seamlessly scale all the way up to thousands of dollars per month. Launching a side project on Heroku and AWS seems to cost a minimum of $69.00 per month. I typically need at least a hobby web and worker dyno ($7 each), Redis Micro for $5, and a Standard 0 Postgres database for $50. (Backups and continuous protection are important.) Actually, I just looked at AWS, and it's about the same price to get started. You could probably start with RDS instance on db.t2.small, for $26. And run your server and workers on a t2.medium server for $34. Maybe the only way to start from $0 is to use AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. But it would be really nice if Kubernetes was as easy to use as Heroku, and you could also start from $0 with a production-ready service.

meesterdude 9y ago
> Launching a side project on Heroku and AWS seems to cost a minimum of $69.00 per month. I disagree with your assessment of "minimum". the $7/mo is more than enough for starting out; enough to validate your idea and serve some customers. If you need more services, you can get a digital ocean box for $10, with less "seamless" scaling. or, move to heroku once you have validation.
- nathan_f77 9y ago
  You're right if you're just starting out with no customers. But as soon as you get your first customer who is paying money and depending on your service, it's really important to use production-ready services.
nogox 9y ago
Try hyper.sh. They are the new Heroku for Docker.
- nathan_f77 9y ago

mack1001 9y ago

Days are numbered for infra software detached from a cloud provider. Cloud Foundry and VMware folding (partnering with Google Cloud) is a good indicator that there is no clear path forward. So Kubernetes on prem or custom rolled on a cloud will not win the fight against GKE or ECS. Openstack,DC/OS, Openshift are all risky bets from a career standpoint.

anoother 9y ago
Some people want to know how the nuts & bolts work as opposed to putting together borrowed Lego blocks. Linux has more than proven the utility of diversely-sourced development, and Kubernetes benefits from the same right now. I'd be worried if that changed. Also, there are (and will continute to be) plenty of companies/projects that can't use public clouds for a variety of security, compliance, performance and business inertia concerns ('concerns', not necessarily 'reasons').
- mack1001 9y ago
  In the next few years, on prem will become the exception than the rule considering that heavily regulated industries are now moving to the cloud. The same way hardware providers like HP, DELL and EMC are struggling, IMHO the next wave will be infra software providers. Unless for very specific purposes, the ROI of running your own infra software is decreasing. Edit: typo
rdtsc 9y ago
Or is it the other way, days of overcharging and being locked into a cloud provider are numbered since the software that runs the infrastructure is not the secret / proprietary anymore. See, can spin it either way :-)
- mack1001 9y ago
  Small data point but the uptake of aws lambda has been crazy in spite of the clear lock-in. Similarly S3 and several other proprietary cloud services. The cost of infra software is nominal compared to what it takes to manage it and maintain high uptime.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

VMs are such a clunky workaround. Sure, lxc keeps the performance ok, but you still end up with a significant amount of redundant data. Rather than work around the limitations of Debian-like package management, I find it easier, and more worth while to just start using more advanced package managers like Guix or Nix.