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For developers, or for operators? Orchestration makes it trivial to recover from the downtime of individual nodes, unintentional (crashes) or intentional (mana

For developers, or for operators? Orchestration makes it trivial to recover from the downtime of individual nodes, unintentional (crashes) or intentional (managing updates of the node's underlying OS). Making load balancing, (basic) service discovery, storage as part of the deployment artifact drastically reduces deployment risk. We can have a discussion about which orchestration platform is best, and we can have a discussion on whether you need orchestration if you're a two-person startup using mostly a lot of SaaS and you have Really Only One Thing running in your production environment. But doubting the value of orchestration? Really?

jwr 8y ago
Nothing is "trivial" about orchestration. It introduces entire new layers of complexity, new failure modes, as well as second-order effects that are poorly understood. People are not afraid enough of complexity. I also think that solutions like Kubernetes should be used only when you really have to. And even then very carefully and never without a tool like Chaos Monkey.
- specialp 8y ago
  Orchestration does introduce complexity but it does so with a large base of users, developers and general ecosystem. As developers and systems implementors we are already sitting on top of a huge stack of what could be an impossibly complex system (CPUs, operating systems, networks) But people have worked on their layer and made it robust and everyone benefits. With that said we have been running K8s for 2 years now in production and have not once had an issue that we could attribute to it. So yes we do have another abstraction (complexity) layer, but to us the complexity does not equate to complicated problems. The benefits gained from the seamless redundancy, discovery, scalability, encapsulation and resource management have not cost us anything. If we had a shaky hard to understand stack that failed often I'd 100% agree.
  - raesene9 8y ago
    One other complexity that k8s (or similar) introduces is more security concerns. If you've been runnning for 2 years now, I'm sure you'll have seen the changes required to secure Kubernetes from the "old days". Managing the multiple TLS CAs, RBAC, PSP, Network Policy etc is non-trivial.
    - humbleMouse 8y ago
      One thing I never see mentioned in these k8's threads is Openshift. Openshift solves most of the crappy things about k8's, including being much more secure and getting security updates from redhat. (openshift runs on top of k8's for those who didnt know)
      - raesene9 8y ago
        Yep I tend to recommend Openshift if people want a good out of the box security experience. The only challenge with it is that Redhat have their own naming around various pieces, which I think some people find jarring to move to.
striking 8y ago
Edited my comment to make it clear that I don't doubt the value of orchestration, but rather that orchestration doesn't always make everything just work especially in prod

jwr 8y ago

Nothing is "trivial" about orchestration. It introduces entire new layers of complexity, new failure modes, as well as second-order effects that are poorly understood. People are not afraid enough of complexity. I also think that solutions like Kubernetes should be used only when you really have to. And even then very carefully and never without a tool like Chaos Monkey.

specialp 8y ago
Orchestration does introduce complexity but it does so with a large base of users, developers and general ecosystem. As developers and systems implementors we are already sitting on top of a huge stack of what could be an impossibly complex system (CPUs, operating systems, networks) But people have worked on their layer and made it robust and everyone benefits. With that said we have been running K8s for 2 years now in production and have not once had an issue that we could attribute to it. So yes we do have another abstraction (complexity) layer, but to us the complexity does not equate to complicated problems. The benefits gained from the seamless redundancy, discovery, scalability, encapsulation and resource management have not cost us anything. If we had a shaky hard to understand stack that failed often I'd 100% agree.
- raesene9 8y ago
  One other complexity that k8s (or similar) introduces is more security concerns. If you've been runnning for 2 years now, I'm sure you'll have seen the changes required to secure Kubernetes from the "old days". Managing the multiple TLS CAs, RBAC, PSP, Network Policy etc is non-trivial.
  - humbleMouse 8y ago
    One thing I never see mentioned in these k8's threads is Openshift. Openshift solves most of the crappy things about k8's, including being much more secure and getting security updates from redhat. (openshift runs on top of k8's for those who didnt know)
    - raesene9 8y ago
      Yep I tend to recommend Openshift if people want a good out of the box security experience. The only challenge with it is that Redhat have their own naming around various pieces, which I think some people find jarring to move to.

striking 8y ago

Edited my comment to make it clear that I don't doubt the value of orchestration, but rather that orchestration doesn't always make everything just work especially in prod