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I am a developer and I find k8s frustrating. To me, its documentation is confusing and scattered among too many places (best example: overlay networks). I have

by cygned 8y ago

I am a developer and I find k8s frustrating. To me, its documentation is confusing and scattered among too many places (best example: overlay networks). I have read multiple books and gazillions of articles and yet I have the feeling that I am lacking the bigger picture. I was able to set it up successfully a couple of times, with more or less time required. Last time, I gave up after four days because I realized that what I need was a "I just want to run a simple cluster" solution and while k8s might provide that, its flexibility makes it hard for me to use it.

FridgeSeal 8y ago
Have you used other google products? I find their documentation routinely incomprehensible and difficult.
- innocentoldguy 8y ago
  Agreed! I am an engineer and have written documentation off and on throughout my career. I'm continuously dismayed at the incomprehensible documentation generated by most companies. Google's documentation is particularly bad though.
- abledon 8y ago
  I have a theory that the type of people who make it past the google interview are smart people who are bad at teaching. Like they get all the concepts, algos etc.. but when it comes to distilling it into an Explain-Like-Im-5 tutorial, it just goes to hell very quickly. What they need to do is hire some people who are great teachers, explainers etc.. Avoid people who rely on already attained technical knowledge, design patterns, algos etc.. to pattern match on new tech to instantly grok it. The 'noob' people who question the engineers who designed the tools and ask a ton of dumb questions about how it works so they can then translate it into everyday tutorial paragraphs.
hjacobs 8y ago
Kelsey has the answer for you: "Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It's a better place to start; not the endgame." (https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/935252923721793536 https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/93525292372179353...) As an application developer, you probably also don't work with the Kernel and syscalls directly (anymore), so I guess you can expect higher abstractions and a smoother experience for Kubernetes in the future.
jacques_chester 8y ago
Kubernetes has always had an identity crisis. Who is aimed at, app developers or platform operators? Clear, obvious contracts between the two roles are valuable, even if you decide to combine them. I'm moderately hopeful that Knative will help in that regard, as it is more conclusively oriented towards the developer. But I am wary that since it leaves the implementation details completely visible, it may not achieve that goal. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we have products based on both of these.
- cygned 8y ago
  Achieving that is a difficulty task, though. Personally, I’d not like to rely on an abstraction on top of a system with that level of complexity for production because I expect to run into situations that can only be solved with deep knowledge of k8s.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    I feel like this separation is achievable, if only because it's been achieved several times already. Google App Engine did it. Heroku did it. Cloud Foundry did it. In none of these situations does an app developer need to know or care how the bits are plumbed, they only need to enjoy hot and cold running code.
- bpicolo 8y ago
  > app developers or platform operators Definitely not the former. The YAML-based configuration is not a pleasant app deployment experience. Companies end up needing to do some sort of auto-generation for it to make it sane for app devs. App developers want experiences similar to heroku. They want to git push and have applications safely roll out without downtime or configuration.
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    I’m a little behind on Cloud Native adoption so I gotta ask - what’s preventing a “git push to heroku” from being the norm here? Are we using the wrong abstractions? Or are the abstractions still too low? ...why is Heroku/buildpack not running away with it?
quickthrower2 8y ago
Perhaps there is a good plural sight course? Sounds like a tech you have to invest many hours to learn.
shaklee3 8y ago
Kubernetes doesn't specify anything about overlay networks. That's up to the CNI provider. Are you referring to flannel's documentation?

by cygned 8y ago

FridgeSeal 8y ago

Have you used other google products? I find their documentation routinely incomprehensible and difficult.

innocentoldguy 8y ago
Agreed! I am an engineer and have written documentation off and on throughout my career. I'm continuously dismayed at the incomprehensible documentation generated by most companies. Google's documentation is particularly bad though.
abledon 8y ago
I have a theory that the type of people who make it past the google interview are smart people who are bad at teaching. Like they get all the concepts, algos etc.. but when it comes to distilling it into an Explain-Like-Im-5 tutorial, it just goes to hell very quickly. What they need to do is hire some people who are great teachers, explainers etc.. Avoid people who rely on already attained technical knowledge, design patterns, algos etc.. to pattern match on new tech to instantly grok it. The 'noob' people who question the engineers who designed the tools and ask a ton of dumb questions about how it works so they can then translate it into everyday tutorial paragraphs.

hjacobs 8y ago

Kelsey has the answer for you: "Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It's a better place to start; not the endgame." (https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/935252923721793536 https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/93525292372179353...) As an application developer, you probably also don't work with the Kernel and syscalls directly (anymore), so I guess you can expect higher abstractions and a smoother experience for Kubernetes in the future.

jacques_chester 8y ago

Kubernetes has always had an identity crisis. Who is aimed at, app developers or platform operators? Clear, obvious contracts between the two roles are valuable, even if you decide to combine them. I'm moderately hopeful that Knative will help in that regard, as it is more conclusively oriented towards the developer. But I am wary that since it leaves the implementation details completely visible, it may not achieve that goal. Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we have products based on both of these.

cygned 8y ago
Achieving that is a difficulty task, though. Personally, I’d not like to rely on an abstraction on top of a system with that level of complexity for production because I expect to run into situations that can only be solved with deep knowledge of k8s.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I feel like this separation is achievable, if only because it's been achieved several times already. Google App Engine did it. Heroku did it. Cloud Foundry did it. In none of these situations does an app developer need to know or care how the bits are plumbed, they only need to enjoy hot and cold running code.
bpicolo 8y ago
> app developers or platform operators Definitely not the former. The YAML-based configuration is not a pleasant app deployment experience. Companies end up needing to do some sort of auto-generation for it to make it sane for app devs. App developers want experiences similar to heroku. They want to git push and have applications safely roll out without downtime or configuration.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  I’m a little behind on Cloud Native adoption so I gotta ask - what’s preventing a “git push to heroku” from being the norm here? Are we using the wrong abstractions? Or are the abstractions still too low? ...why is Heroku/buildpack not running away with it?

quickthrower2 8y ago

Perhaps there is a good plural sight course? Sounds like a tech you have to invest many hours to learn.

shaklee3 8y ago

Kubernetes doesn't specify anything about overlay networks. That's up to the CNI provider. Are you referring to flannel's documentation?