3 ms·

A lot if you are using a managed Kubernetes solution. It is surprisingly easy and affordable to setup nowadays. We're currently running on DO and it is a pure

by ahnick 6y ago

A lot if you are using a managed Kubernetes solution. It is surprisingly easy and affordable to setup nowadays. We're currently running on DO and it is a pure joy. - IaC, no servers to manage (Terraform + kubectl/helm) - reasonable HA with minimal effort - easily configurable metrics (prometheus) - automated/minimal effort horizontal scaling - easy SSL certificate installation and automated renewal - operate multiple low traffic sites from a single cluster - quickly access your environment through a single ide (https://k8slens.dev/ https://k8slens.dev/)

yongjik 6y ago
This might be an unfair criticism, but prometheus didn't impress me. Last time I found that it cannot even compute "average CPU usage of all jobs whose name starts with X" - what it can do is to compute "average CPU usage of each job whose name starts with X" and then average these numbers. So what's the issue, you ask? Well, if you're averaging over one week, and one of these jobs ran for exactly one hour with 1.0 CPU, then the average for that particular job is 1.0/24/7 = 0.00595! Now imagine averaging these numbers and wondering WTF has gone wrong.
Greybeard92 6y ago
1. IaC / no servers isn't a plus. It's vastly easier to SSH into a server and do anything you already can on a desktop 2. So do CoLocos, but better "HA" with no effort at all 3. /var/log + bash grep 4. Reverse proxy, just add another IP address and a load balancer 5. This is true anywhere 6. Nginx and apache both do this, dead simply 7. SSH + cli editor of your choice Kubernetes does nothing new, but pad more resumes. The UX "design" of the dev-ops world.
- ahnick 6y ago
  1. You can't replace everything that Terraform does with "SSH into a server". For example, in Terraform you are specifying exactly what the compute resources are going to be used on the node and even SSH itself might be part of the software that gets provisioned. 2. "do CoLocos" definitely has effort and does not in anyway guarantee HA. (HA is really more of a software application layer concern not hardware) Also, are you telling me you are going to engineer an HA load balancer service better than the people who work for the major cloud vendors? Are you going to setup all your own service discovery, scheduling and everything else k8s does for your application? 3. Prometheus and other solutions are so much more than "/var/log + bash grep" you can't possibly seriously equate the two. Serious applications demand serious metric solutions. 4. Sure let me do all that while my site starts getting the HN hug of death or you know I could do nothing and let my infrastructure autoscale for me. Even in a non-autoscale setup, all you have to do is change a couple of numbers in your terraform and k8s config files and reapply. 5. No it isn't. For some webservers like Caddy it's easier than others, but in many cases you are going to have to a good amount of manual steps to get auto renewal working for your Let's Encrypt certs. On K8s it's basically a config file and a helm chart install. Plus you have K8s guaranteeing that it will restart the renewal service should it go down. 6. Yes you can specify config in your webserver for the routing, but being able to run completely distinct application servers on the same nodes handling all the routing and service resiliency takes a lot of effort, while not running into conflicts with your existing applications that are already running. You are going to get a lot better bang for your buck running multiple applications on the same set of nodes than having to provision separate nodes for the other applications. 7. SSH + cli does not give you a cluster wide view of your application. You would have to feed all that information into a single location to be able to view it, which would take a lot of effort and still wouldn't provide the same level of detail. As a small business, I'd much rather have well engineered solutions that will be able to grow with my business. A lot of what you describe might be okay when your business is very small and has a single server (basically you can afford to treat it as a pet), but as your business grows you want to avoid having to rework various parts of your infrastructure if possible. Managed k8s gives you a lot of room to grow with relatively little upfront time investment.
  - llama052 6y ago
    Piggybacking on your comment, not agreeing with the previous poster. Currently using all of the tooling you've mentioned on-premise and it's great! Using DNS Anycast (cloudflare/akamai/insert provider) and LB technology we can get highly available without much work. We've got more 9's than our Azure production setups, sadly though I feel like Azure isn't a good standard to compare to. Bridging the gap from the cloud provider managed services to on-premise (colo) is actually relatively simple. By all means 95% of the tooling these providers use is Open source or has a major open source alternative. SMB world does change that to your point as I doubt you'll have a devops rockstar who can actually grok these things, more than likely you'll have a dinosaur MSP or IT guy. (for really small companies)

by ahnick 6y ago

yongjik 6y ago

This might be an unfair criticism, but prometheus didn't impress me. Last time I found that it cannot even compute "average CPU usage of all jobs whose name starts with X" - what it can do is to compute "average CPU usage of each job whose name starts with X" and then average these numbers. So what's the issue, you ask? Well, if you're averaging over one week, and one of these jobs ran for exactly one hour with 1.0 CPU, then the average for that particular job is 1.0/24/7 = 0.00595! Now imagine averaging these numbers and wondering WTF has gone wrong.

Greybeard92 6y ago

1. IaC / no servers isn't a plus. It's vastly easier to SSH into a server and do anything you already can on a desktop 2. So do CoLocos, but better "HA" with no effort at all 3. /var/log + bash grep 4. Reverse proxy, just add another IP address and a load balancer 5. This is true anywhere 6. Nginx and apache both do this, dead simply 7. SSH + cli editor of your choice Kubernetes does nothing new, but pad more resumes. The UX "design" of the dev-ops world.

ahnick 6y ago
1. You can't replace everything that Terraform does with "SSH into a server". For example, in Terraform you are specifying exactly what the compute resources are going to be used on the node and even SSH itself might be part of the software that gets provisioned. 2. "do CoLocos" definitely has effort and does not in anyway guarantee HA. (HA is really more of a software application layer concern not hardware) Also, are you telling me you are going to engineer an HA load balancer service better than the people who work for the major cloud vendors? Are you going to setup all your own service discovery, scheduling and everything else k8s does for your application? 3. Prometheus and other solutions are so much more than "/var/log + bash grep" you can't possibly seriously equate the two. Serious applications demand serious metric solutions. 4. Sure let me do all that while my site starts getting the HN hug of death or you know I could do nothing and let my infrastructure autoscale for me. Even in a non-autoscale setup, all you have to do is change a couple of numbers in your terraform and k8s config files and reapply. 5. No it isn't. For some webservers like Caddy it's easier than others, but in many cases you are going to have to a good amount of manual steps to get auto renewal working for your Let's Encrypt certs. On K8s it's basically a config file and a helm chart install. Plus you have K8s guaranteeing that it will restart the renewal service should it go down. 6. Yes you can specify config in your webserver for the routing, but being able to run completely distinct application servers on the same nodes handling all the routing and service resiliency takes a lot of effort, while not running into conflicts with your existing applications that are already running. You are going to get a lot better bang for your buck running multiple applications on the same set of nodes than having to provision separate nodes for the other applications. 7. SSH + cli does not give you a cluster wide view of your application. You would have to feed all that information into a single location to be able to view it, which would take a lot of effort and still wouldn't provide the same level of detail. As a small business, I'd much rather have well engineered solutions that will be able to grow with my business. A lot of what you describe might be okay when your business is very small and has a single server (basically you can afford to treat it as a pet), but as your business grows you want to avoid having to rework various parts of your infrastructure if possible. Managed k8s gives you a lot of room to grow with relatively little upfront time investment.
- llama052 6y ago
  Piggybacking on your comment, not agreeing with the previous poster. Currently using all of the tooling you've mentioned on-premise and it's great! Using DNS Anycast (cloudflare/akamai/insert provider) and LB technology we can get highly available without much work. We've got more 9's than our Azure production setups, sadly though I feel like Azure isn't a good standard to compare to. Bridging the gap from the cloud provider managed services to on-premise (colo) is actually relatively simple. By all means 95% of the tooling these providers use is Open source or has a major open source alternative. SMB world does change that to your point as I doubt you'll have a devops rockstar who can actually grok these things, more than likely you'll have a dinosaur MSP or IT guy. (for really small companies)