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Yeah I’m setting this up on Linode’s beta k8s product. Funny thing is that I know how to do mid-level server admin. Most of that comes from building and mainta

by geuis 7y ago

Yeah I’m setting this up on Linode’s beta k8s product. Funny thing is that I know how to do mid-level server admin. Most of that comes from building and maintaining the servers for https://jsonip.com https://jsonip.com for years. iptables, nginx configs, etc. Building up a new Ubuntu server from scratch isn’t second nature, but I have a run book and enough familiarity that it isn’t hard. I’ve even worked with Kubernetes a little over the last few years at a couple jobs. Dockerize my app, use some kubectl commands to get it deployed. Luckily I wasn’t responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. Last night I had this realization. The last company I worked at is now publicly traded and has hundreds of millions of users. When I left they were just starting to experiment with k8s but we weren’t using it in production anywhere. There was an entire devops team working on it for at least a year and it still wasn’t ready for production. So I realized that I don’t actually need Kubernetes. I’m super small scale and working on this project on my own. They scaled up to be a billion dollar company without it. But then it leaves me in the position of either hacking together my own limited auto scaling infrastructure or struggling through with Kubernetes. I’m not really sure which direction to move tonight. I have enough personal funds for maybe 6 months to a year and this is just eating up time. Do I struggle through a few more days trying to get this working with Kubernetes and “do it the right way” or give up and hack together a nodejs app that monitors system performance and auto scales for me as needed? At least with the “hacky” app I’ll understand at a base level what’s going on. It’ll take the same time to implement, but when problems eventually crop up I’ll know what’s going on and how to fix it. But with Kubernetes I’ll forget most of the details after it’s working and fixing the inevitable issues will mean re-educating myself during a downtime. Neither is great, but it makes me lean towards DIY. And DIY is what systems like Kubernetes were built to purportedly replace. Help!

miscPerson 7y ago
There’s an expression at Amazon, adopted from our Indian colleagues: do the needful. It means do what’s necessary to accomplish your objective and don’t worry so much about what the “right” approach is — that you should feel empowered to solve problems, not get caught up in the never ending stream of people yelling about what is “correct”. Your goal is to release a product, and you have a tight deadline, so use the tools that let you accomplish that — what you’re familiar with, what you understand, and what enables you to work quickly. If Kubernetes authors have opinions about how you work, they should show some customer obsession and release a product you can effectively use. That’s not your problem. Your problem is releasing your app. Do the needful. There’s no shame in that. For some meme fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0fMHt2edZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0fMHt2edZc
- ken 7y ago
  This explains a lot of the strange engineering I've seen from Amazon over the past several years. Like why there's almost no coherence among the AWS services, or why the error-handling and documentation is never up to par, or why they're happy to throw away a library and replace it with another one with a completely different interface. Amazon doesn't need these things! I will say that this behavior has generated absolutely zero loyalty in me. The only reason I use any Amazon service today is because I made that decision in the past, and it's more work to change. They look to me like the Blackberry of web services right now. It works, and they have millions of customers, but they simply don't comprehend how much better the experience could be.
geuis 7y ago
@miscPerson you had a very good reply I don’t know why it was downvoted.
tudorconstantin 7y ago
I've re-setup my baremetal server I rent at hetzner in December to have a modern ops infrastructure. I started with k8s because it seemed pretty straight forward to have it up using rancher. After about a week of not being able to configure a simple hello world nginx docker image I gave up and tried using docker swarm. I couldn't be happier with the decision: in less than a month of working on it during evenings and weekends I was able to set up a reverse proxy with traefik, a self hosted gitlab instance, a docker private registry and a full CI/CD pipeline. With docker swarm, if you can 'docker-compose up ...' an app, you can also 'docker swarm deploy' it, with almost no modifications needed. Also if your needs grow and you really need k8s, you can 'kompose up' (or something similar, since I haven't got there yet) and have it deployed to a k8s cluster. But I imagine by the time my apps will need to run on k8s, they'll make enough money I will afford a devops team to handle the migration. Feel free to contact me (info on my profile) if you think I can help you in any way having it set up.
toast0 7y ago
> At least with the “hacky” app I’ll understand at a base level what’s going on. It’ll take the same time to implement, but when problems eventually crop up I’ll know what’s going on and how to fix it. Being able to understand and remember a system is what allows you to control and operate a system. If you build a simple system, you may need to intervene more often, but most interventions will be simple. If you build a complex system well, manual interventions will be less frequent, but they are likely to be a lot harder.

by geuis 7y ago

miscPerson 7y ago

There’s an expression at Amazon, adopted from our Indian colleagues: do the needful. It means do what’s necessary to accomplish your objective and don’t worry so much about what the “right” approach is — that you should feel empowered to solve problems, not get caught up in the never ending stream of people yelling about what is “correct”. Your goal is to release a product, and you have a tight deadline, so use the tools that let you accomplish that — what you’re familiar with, what you understand, and what enables you to work quickly. If Kubernetes authors have opinions about how you work, they should show some customer obsession and release a product you can effectively use. That’s not your problem. Your problem is releasing your app. Do the needful. There’s no shame in that. For some meme fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0fMHt2edZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0fMHt2edZc

ken 7y ago
This explains a lot of the strange engineering I've seen from Amazon over the past several years. Like why there's almost no coherence among the AWS services, or why the error-handling and documentation is never up to par, or why they're happy to throw away a library and replace it with another one with a completely different interface. Amazon doesn't need these things! I will say that this behavior has generated absolutely zero loyalty in me. The only reason I use any Amazon service today is because I made that decision in the past, and it's more work to change. They look to me like the Blackberry of web services right now. It works, and they have millions of customers, but they simply don't comprehend how much better the experience could be.

geuis 7y ago

@miscPerson you had a very good reply I don’t know why it was downvoted.

tudorconstantin 7y ago

I've re-setup my baremetal server I rent at hetzner in December to have a modern ops infrastructure. I started with k8s because it seemed pretty straight forward to have it up using rancher. After about a week of not being able to configure a simple hello world nginx docker image I gave up and tried using docker swarm. I couldn't be happier with the decision: in less than a month of working on it during evenings and weekends I was able to set up a reverse proxy with traefik, a self hosted gitlab instance, a docker private registry and a full CI/CD pipeline. With docker swarm, if you can 'docker-compose up ...' an app, you can also 'docker swarm deploy' it, with almost no modifications needed. Also if your needs grow and you really need k8s, you can 'kompose up' (or something similar, since I haven't got there yet) and have it deployed to a k8s cluster. But I imagine by the time my apps will need to run on k8s, they'll make enough money I will afford a devops team to handle the migration. Feel free to contact me (info on my profile) if you think I can help you in any way having it set up.

toast0 7y ago

> At least with the “hacky” app I’ll understand at a base level what’s going on. It’ll take the same time to implement, but when problems eventually crop up I’ll know what’s going on and how to fix it. Being able to understand and remember a system is what allows you to control and operate a system. If you build a simple system, you may need to intervene more often, but most interventions will be simple. If you build a complex system well, manual interventions will be less frequent, but they are likely to be a lot harder.