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From a developers' perspective, k8s feels like a holy Grail. Having fully embraced it with my latest rails app, I can say confidently that I've never had a more

From a developers' perspective, k8s feels like a holy Grail. Having fully embraced it with my latest rails app, I can say confidently that I've never had a more straightforward and enjoyable experience than K8s. It's absolutely the correct abstraction layer for me; it gives me all the power I could ask for in as concise a definition as I could possibly expect. I think a lot of the complaints against K8s are from the ops side of things. In my org, I don't actually run or upgrade the K8s cluster myself, so those pain points aren't mine to bear. When you're running your own k8s, the operational complexity of managing the cluster itself is not trivial and the change in mindset for traditional sysadmin types is a substantial hurdle. My own take: K8s (or something very much like it) is absolutely the future, but the operational challenges of migrating to it at this time should not be ignored if you want to run it yourself and have existing ops experience. This will only get easier over time as tooling improves and sysadmins start seeing that this is the future they have to embrace.

manigandham 8y ago
Agree, although I don't think the Ops portion is that hard either, at least certainly not that different from all the other complex software that used to be installed and maintained. I feel it's just the usual pushback against change and general commoditization of IT that's leading to most of the complaints.
- JeremyNT 8y ago
  I think I agree with this also, but my experience is limited enough to allow for the likelihood of additional complexity and gotchas that will become evident over time. I'm sympathetic to concerns of ops, having worked in that space before working as a developer. It's tough to dive into a new approach and discard existing, well understood solutions. It's an especially hard sell when the benefits of the new tech are opaque and/or don't solve problems you personally have (until I actually used k8s for my own project, I really didn't understand the hype either). I'd suggest though that the "usual pushback" is a powerful force on its own that may make k8s a poor fit for an org (right now). If some portion of the staff - especially those responsible for reliably maintaining the infrastructure - is resistant to the approach, rushing adoption is highly likely to lead to failure (if for entirely non-technical reasons). The benefits of k8s will only become more apparent and more easily realized over time, and the opportunity cost of waiting until there are fewer "Kubernetes Failure Stories" on HN might not be all that great.

manigandham 8y ago

Agree, although I don't think the Ops portion is that hard either, at least certainly not that different from all the other complex software that used to be installed and maintained. I feel it's just the usual pushback against change and general commoditization of IT that's leading to most of the complaints.

JeremyNT 8y ago
I think I agree with this also, but my experience is limited enough to allow for the likelihood of additional complexity and gotchas that will become evident over time. I'm sympathetic to concerns of ops, having worked in that space before working as a developer. It's tough to dive into a new approach and discard existing, well understood solutions. It's an especially hard sell when the benefits of the new tech are opaque and/or don't solve problems you personally have (until I actually used k8s for my own project, I really didn't understand the hype either). I'd suggest though that the "usual pushback" is a powerful force on its own that may make k8s a poor fit for an org (right now). If some portion of the staff - especially those responsible for reliably maintaining the infrastructure - is resistant to the approach, rushing adoption is highly likely to lead to failure (if for entirely non-technical reasons). The benefits of k8s will only become more apparent and more easily realized over time, and the opportunity cost of waiting until there are fewer "Kubernetes Failure Stories" on HN might not be all that great.