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It's funny, and telling, how many commenters here are using K8s without really knowing how it works (and what this change therefore means). I'm in that group my

It's funny, and telling, how many commenters here are using K8s without really knowing how it works (and what this change therefore means). I'm in that group myself. Is this a testament to, or an indictment of, how abstracted our systems have become?

jrochkind1 6y ago
If it works it's fine. I took an Operating Systems class decades ago in school in which I wrote a toy OS, but at this point I couldn't tell you much about how operating systems really work, but I deploy software to them everyday. That is fine, it is the nature of computers, they are basically abstraction machines. And OS's are pretty mature and stable, I don't really ever need to debug the OS itself in order to deploy software to one, for the kind of software I write. (Others might need to know more). But personally I still haven't figured out how to use K8, heh.
symlinkk 6y ago
The purpose of every piece of software is to be usable without knowing how it works.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I feel like “how something works” and “implementation details” aren’t synonymous and are really context dependent. As a user you should know the different types of namespacing that affect containers without necessarily knowing that/how your runtime calls clone() to do it. And as a sysadmin you had better know how all the components fit together and their failure modes because you’re the one supporting them. Different people have different views of any technology so someone’s necessary understanding as a user of managed k8s can be different than a sysadmin who is a user of k8s code itself.
pm90 6y ago
Would you say you know the intricacies of how VMs work before using them to deploy apps? There is nothing “un abstract” about running applications on VMs or machines. We’re just evolving the abstractions that we work with. Before it was VMs, then containers and now containers + orchestrators. In the future it will be some other abstraction. Every step of the way, we’ve made this transition for compelling reasons. And it will happen again.
- fulafel 6y ago
  VMs definitely are leaky abstractions. Less so as time goes on and the illusion is refined. Eg timekeeping used to be a problem on VMs. And how many people have spent dev time debugging mysterious freezes on EC2 only to discover their RDS or whatever had been on a bursting instance type?
amackera 6y ago
Not having to care about implementation details seems like a positive thing to me. There's a reason RTFM is a meme and "read the fucking source code" is not. Anybody claiming they need to know everything about their dependencies is being unrealistic.
quickthrower2 6y ago
I use my car without knowing how it works. The weird thing about programming is that as a job, if I had a company car they'd be happy for me to call the mechanic to fix it, but if kubernetes ain't working then that's another job for the multihatted programmer. That sort of means, from a selfish point of view it's better to pick one of the locked-in cloud technologies that you can't fix (AWS or Azure has to!). But I suspect many do the opposite (I want k8s on my cv!)

jrochkind1 6y ago

If it works it's fine. I took an Operating Systems class decades ago in school in which I wrote a toy OS, but at this point I couldn't tell you much about how operating systems really work, but I deploy software to them everyday. That is fine, it is the nature of computers, they are basically abstraction machines. And OS's are pretty mature and stable, I don't really ever need to debug the OS itself in order to deploy software to one, for the kind of software I write. (Others might need to know more). But personally I still haven't figured out how to use K8, heh.

symlinkk 6y ago

The purpose of every piece of software is to be usable without knowing how it works.

Spivak 6y ago
I feel like “how something works” and “implementation details” aren’t synonymous and are really context dependent. As a user you should know the different types of namespacing that affect containers without necessarily knowing that/how your runtime calls clone() to do it. And as a sysadmin you had better know how all the components fit together and their failure modes because you’re the one supporting them. Different people have different views of any technology so someone’s necessary understanding as a user of managed k8s can be different than a sysadmin who is a user of k8s code itself.

pm90 6y ago

Would you say you know the intricacies of how VMs work before using them to deploy apps? There is nothing “un abstract” about running applications on VMs or machines. We’re just evolving the abstractions that we work with. Before it was VMs, then containers and now containers + orchestrators. In the future it will be some other abstraction. Every step of the way, we’ve made this transition for compelling reasons. And it will happen again.

fulafel 6y ago
VMs definitely are leaky abstractions. Less so as time goes on and the illusion is refined. Eg timekeeping used to be a problem on VMs. And how many people have spent dev time debugging mysterious freezes on EC2 only to discover their RDS or whatever had been on a bursting instance type?

amackera 6y ago

Not having to care about implementation details seems like a positive thing to me. There's a reason RTFM is a meme and "read the fucking source code" is not. Anybody claiming they need to know everything about their dependencies is being unrealistic.

quickthrower2 6y ago

I use my car without knowing how it works. The weird thing about programming is that as a job, if I had a company car they'd be happy for me to call the mechanic to fix it, but if kubernetes ain't working then that's another job for the multihatted programmer. That sort of means, from a selfish point of view it's better to pick one of the locked-in cloud technologies that you can't fix (AWS or Azure has to!). But I suspect many do the opposite (I want k8s on my cv!)