5 ms·
It's pretty common for new technologies to advertise themselves as "adopt, and forget about it", but in my experience it's unheard of that any actually deliver
by ken 8y ago
It's pretty common for new technologies to advertise themselves as "adopt, and forget about it", but in my experience it's unheard of that any actually deliver on this promise.
Any technology you adopt today is a technology you're going to have to troubleshoot tomorrow. (I don't think the 15,000 Kubernetes questions on StackOverflow are all from initial setup.) I can't remember the last [application / service / file format / website / language / anything related to computer software] that was so simple and reliable that I wasn't searching the internet for answers (and banging my head against the wall because of) the very next month. It was probably something on my C=64.
As Kernighan said back in the 1970's, "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" I've never used Kubernetes, but I've read some articles about it and watched some videos, and despite the nonstop bragging about its simplicity (red flag #1), I'm not sure I can figure out how to deploy with it. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't have any hope of fixing it when it breaks next month.
Hearing testimonials only from people who say "it doesn't break!" is red flag #2. No technology works perfectly for everyone, so I want to hear from the people who had to troubleshoot it, not the people who think it's all sunshine and rainbows. And those people are not kind, and make it sound like the cost is way more than just "8 hours reading the docs" -- in fact, the docs are often called out as part of the problem.
- oso2k 8y agoDisclaimer: I work for Red Hat as an OpenShift Consulting Architect. If you want a gentle, free introduction to OpenShift (our Kubernetes distribution), I recommend trying out Katacoda portal, Learn OpenShift [0]. Katacoda [1] also has vanilla Kubernetes lessons as well. [0] https://learn.openshift.com/ https://learn.openshift.com/ [1] https://www.katacoda.com/ https://www.katacoda.com/
- zebraflask 8y agoI have yet to see a K instance that doesn't somehow manage to break.
- oso2k 8y agoIn my experience, the clusters that break are clusters that are architected poorly and/or go unmaintained. There's also some of us that believe clusters need to be treated more like cattle rather than pets.
- jerguismi 8y agoYeah so you need only to be super genious to design the system properly and then it won't break. Somehow I like being stupid and use technologies that allow me being stupid and still work good enough.
- oso2k 8y agoDisclaimer: I work as a Red Hat Consulting Architect focused on OpenShift (our Kubernetes distro). I didn’t say anything about being a genius or being stupid. But it does help to have some something to reference [0][1]. In short, there’s several things that help. 1) Start with 3 Master nodes that sit behind an Enterprise Load Balancer (or even HAProxy) and a VIP (console.example.com) 2) We choose to have 3 Infrastructure nodes that perform Container load balancing (app routers), log aggregation, metrics collection, and registry hosting 3) We then put another VIP and Load Balancer in front of Application Subdomain (*.apps.example.com) so that apps can be exposed outside the cluster (myjavaapp.apps.example.com) 4) Stand up 3 or more worker nodes Yes. This is more complex than plain old Containers. Yes. This is harder than putting an Apache server with RoR and MariaDB on the same Linux VM. But there is lots of value there if you put in the effort. Lots of consultants run “all-in-one” VMs or minishift/minikube On their laptops or homelabs. [0] http://uncontained.io/articles/openshift-ha-installation/ http://uncontained.io/articles/openshift-ha-installation/ [1] https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/3.11/install/index.html https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/3.11/install/i...
- zebraflask 8y agoThis makes sense to me. I'm going to give it a whirl.
- westurner 8y ago> As Kernighan said back in the 1970's, "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" What a great quote. Thanks
- ignoramous 8y agoSome more quotes taken from http://typicalprogrammer.com/what-does-code-readability-mean http://typicalprogrammer.com/what-does-code-readability-mean that you might find interesting. Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. – Martin Fowler Just because people tell you it can’t be done, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be done. It just means that they can’t do it. – Anders Hejlsberg The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don’t know what to do. – John Holt Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. – Brian W. Kernighan The most important property of a program is whether it accomplishes the intention of its user. – C.A.R. Hoare No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It’s unlikely that you’ll be the first. – Andy Hunt