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Things like CNI take away from the development and understanding of general networking technology to scripts and json/yaml wrappers that not only add another la

by throw2016 8y ago

Things like CNI take away from the development and understanding of general networking technology to scripts and json/yaml wrappers that not only add another layer of complexity but also prevent users from understanding what they are actually using. For instance in this post itself we learn about all these CNI wrappers but learn nothing about Vxlan, BGP and Linux networking tools that these are using underneath. And those are actually easy to use directly. This does a disservice to both developers and users. For instance true game changers in this space is tech like Wireguard that can deliver encryption at near line speed and would kill these benchmarks. Everyone can benefit from Wireguard today. Initiatives like CNI encourage wrappers and those then wrapping tools like Wireguard end up getting the recognition and success while the underlying tools like Wireguard fade into the background. This does not seem like a healthy or sustainable development model.

wmf 8y ago
K8s is all about encapsulating devops practices into code, so it's kind of philosophically totally opposite to learning all the details of virtual networking and configuring it from scratch. If Wireguard doesn't write the wrapper themselves they have no one to blame. People need to understand that the hard/cool part and the valuable part aren't the same and if you are too cool to create value then you can't complain about other people taking it.
- throw2016 8y ago
  This is a nice idea about abstraction but without knowledge you cannot run anything professionally with any degree of reliability or confidence. What happens when things break? Google, Facebook and any company dependent on delivery have full fledged networking and ops teams. All these wrappers still require time investment in knowledge, setup and configuration. The cost for users knowing the wrappers but not the tech is being locked in a platform, if they know the tech even if Kubernetes crashes and burns their knowledge and time investment remains valuable. Before Wireguard it was extremely difficult to get near line speed with encryption, now accessible to all. If this is not 'value' what is? Given this post is about networking benchmarks this is a huge deal. If people stop creating these kind of networking tools and technologies then there is going to be nothing to wrap.

wmf 8y ago

K8s is all about encapsulating devops practices into code, so it's kind of philosophically totally opposite to learning all the details of virtual networking and configuring it from scratch. If Wireguard doesn't write the wrapper themselves they have no one to blame. People need to understand that the hard/cool part and the valuable part aren't the same and if you are too cool to create value then you can't complain about other people taking it.

throw2016 8y ago
This is a nice idea about abstraction but without knowledge you cannot run anything professionally with any degree of reliability or confidence. What happens when things break? Google, Facebook and any company dependent on delivery have full fledged networking and ops teams. All these wrappers still require time investment in knowledge, setup and configuration. The cost for users knowing the wrappers but not the tech is being locked in a platform, if they know the tech even if Kubernetes crashes and burns their knowledge and time investment remains valuable. Before Wireguard it was extremely difficult to get near line speed with encryption, now accessible to all. If this is not 'value' what is? Given this post is about networking benchmarks this is a huge deal. If people stop creating these kind of networking tools and technologies then there is going to be nothing to wrap.