4 ms·

I'd argue k8s is overkill for most companies that would fit the M in SMB. Regarding the purported target group of small businesses: No way. No small business ha

I'd argue k8s is overkill for most companies that would fit the M in SMB. Regarding the purported target group of small businesses: No way. No small business has even the need for something like this, I'd argue unless you run technical setups of FAANG proportions you absolutely don't have the need, and if you think you need k8s in a medium-size business please rethink if you really need a system engineered for Google Scale.

p_l 6y ago
It's not about scaling the applications you run on it. It's about providing leverage to your team so you need less effort to do more. And SMB can be anywhere up to 1000 employees if using semi-legal definitions, 500 employees and under 1 billion euro of turnover in case of EU's SME definition. Depending on the area of work, there can be a lot of software to run. And that's where k8s comes in. It might seem "hard" when you're comparing it to "just throw few packages on a server", but having gone through that recently? The next time I'm setting up a single-node server to support tools for a project, I'm using k3s instead of spending 3-5 days getting software to play nice with paths changed to non-standard locations in order to keep data easy to backup and migrate to another server. Or wrestling load balancer (and ours is IaC even! Still not as nice and easy to deal with as nginx-ingress-controller...). The real "scaling" of kubernetes is that once you pass the initial hurdle, the cost and complexity of adding more applications is greatly lowered. Even when you do a dumb lift-and-shift (like I did for >60 applications in one project).
- legostormtroopr 6y ago
  > SMB can be anywhere up to 1000 employees, 500 employees and under 1 billion euro of turnover in case of EU's SME definition By no-ones metric is 1000 employees a small business. The EU defines a small business as under 50 staff, and a medium business as under 250 staff. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/business-friendly-environment/sme-definition_en https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/business-friendly-environme...
  - p_l 6y ago
    SMB is not "small business". It's "Small and MEDIUM Business". And even larger business is often supported by smaller subcontractors. In this area, k8s had been personal saviour where we could not take on a project otherwise. Just thinking of dealing with ~70 applications that had subtly different requirements leaves me shuddering. And that was pretty small deal.

p_l 6y ago

It's not about scaling the applications you run on it. It's about providing leverage to your team so you need less effort to do more. And SMB can be anywhere up to 1000 employees if using semi-legal definitions, 500 employees and under 1 billion euro of turnover in case of EU's SME definition. Depending on the area of work, there can be a lot of software to run. And that's where k8s comes in. It might seem "hard" when you're comparing it to "just throw few packages on a server", but having gone through that recently? The next time I'm setting up a single-node server to support tools for a project, I'm using k3s instead of spending 3-5 days getting software to play nice with paths changed to non-standard locations in order to keep data easy to backup and migrate to another server. Or wrestling load balancer (and ours is IaC even! Still not as nice and easy to deal with as nginx-ingress-controller...). The real "scaling" of kubernetes is that once you pass the initial hurdle, the cost and complexity of adding more applications is greatly lowered. Even when you do a dumb lift-and-shift (like I did for >60 applications in one project).

legostormtroopr 6y ago
> SMB can be anywhere up to 1000 employees, 500 employees and under 1 billion euro of turnover in case of EU's SME definition By no-ones metric is 1000 employees a small business. The EU defines a small business as under 50 staff, and a medium business as under 250 staff. https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/business-friendly-environment/sme-definition_en https://ec.europa.eu/growth/smes/business-friendly-environme...
- p_l 6y ago
  SMB is not "small business". It's "Small and MEDIUM Business". And even larger business is often supported by smaller subcontractors. In this area, k8s had been personal saviour where we could not take on a project otherwise. Just thinking of dealing with ~70 applications that had subtly different requirements leaves me shuddering. And that was pretty small deal.