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But Kubernetes is super complicated. It can be, but running minikube or k3s on your laptop is trivial, and what you do with them transfers very easily to real

But Kubernetes is super complicated. It can be, but running minikube or k3s on your laptop is trivial, and what you do with them transfers very easily to real Kubernetes.

skrebbel 6y ago
Will that allow me to ship software to servers (not enormous clusters, I mean like a couple of VMs somewhere) without having to first become a Kubernetes expert? I mean, that was one of the key Docker promises, and they delivered to quite an extent.
- github_drop_ice 6y ago
  You want helm or one of the many, many tools built on top of kubernetes to ease the deployment of applications. All of the same complexity of deploying services was there with docker, you were just insulated and hidden from it by some of its opinions. Whether you want to or not, if you want to manage costs and performance of your app you're going to need to learn (or pay people who have learned) about how to deploy and manage apps in production at scale.
- WJW 6y ago
  From my experience kubernetes is quite complicated to manage (ie for the "infra team"), but not very complicated to use as a developer. You tell it which container you want it to run and how many copies and off it goes. If you have an existing cluster somewhere (say a managed cluster from AWS or GCP) that you want to run your webapp on, just copy/paste a YAML from any of the hundreds of guides on the internet and off you go. The k8s docs themselves are also pretty thorough. Your app will run with automatic failover and rolling deploys and whatnot right out of the box.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Will that allow me to ship software to servers (not enormous clusters, I mean like a couple of VMs somewhere) without having to first become a Kubernetes expert? Yes absolutely, the YAML will just need to be updated for API keys or whatever. Kubernetes is complicated to build a production grade cluster on bare metal but for getting started as a developer it’s no more complicated than Docker actually
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    This is super helpful, thanks. I always had the idea that I needed to grok all of Kube to get productive with it (and very much got that feeling last time I explored the docs). But knowing that I can ignore a lot of that if I use some kubernetes cloud service and just put my images up there, that's super nice. Thanks (also to some sibling comments of yours) for clearly drawing up the difference between those two things.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      This is super helpful, thanks. I always had the idea that I needed to grok all of Kube to get productive with it The discoverability is still a problem with it, if no one told you e.g. about k3s you would never guess the name. Good luck :-)
- ahnick 6y ago
  Yes, a simple workflow is running Minikube or K3s locally for testing and then pushing it out to a managed Kubernetes platform like DigitalOcean Kubernetes. This avoids having to know any of the underlying details of setting up the Kubernetes cluster. Everything you do in terms of interacting with the cluster on Minikube will be the same as on your production managed Kubernetes. All you really need to learn is some basics around Kubernetes terminology, the kubectl command line utility, and then some of the YAML config syntax for setting up application deployments and probably an ingress into the cluster. You can also add helm into the mix if you'd like to take advantage of pre-built packages that you can install to your cluster. For example SSL certificate management or a webserver ingress like nginx-ingress.
hmottestad 6y ago
I remember trying to set up k3s a few months ago and encountered a hard error that gave zero results when googling. I don't remember the error anymore. Was not impressed though and would not call it trivial to set up.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  I use mini cube and It went pretty smoothly.

But Kubernetes is super complicated. It can be, but running minikube or k3s on your laptop is trivial, and what you do with them transfers very easily to real Kubernetes.

skrebbel 6y ago

Will that allow me to ship software to servers (not enormous clusters, I mean like a couple of VMs somewhere) without having to first become a Kubernetes expert? I mean, that was one of the key Docker promises, and they delivered to quite an extent.

github_drop_ice 6y ago
You want helm or one of the many, many tools built on top of kubernetes to ease the deployment of applications. All of the same complexity of deploying services was there with docker, you were just insulated and hidden from it by some of its opinions. Whether you want to or not, if you want to manage costs and performance of your app you're going to need to learn (or pay people who have learned) about how to deploy and manage apps in production at scale.
WJW 6y ago
From my experience kubernetes is quite complicated to manage (ie for the "infra team"), but not very complicated to use as a developer. You tell it which container you want it to run and how many copies and off it goes. If you have an existing cluster somewhere (say a managed cluster from AWS or GCP) that you want to run your webapp on, just copy/paste a YAML from any of the hundreds of guides on the internet and off you go. The k8s docs themselves are also pretty thorough. Your app will run with automatic failover and rolling deploys and whatnot right out of the box.
goatinaboat 6y ago
Will that allow me to ship software to servers (not enormous clusters, I mean like a couple of VMs somewhere) without having to first become a Kubernetes expert? Yes absolutely, the YAML will just need to be updated for API keys or whatever. Kubernetes is complicated to build a production grade cluster on bare metal but for getting started as a developer it’s no more complicated than Docker actually
- skrebbel 6y ago
  This is super helpful, thanks. I always had the idea that I needed to grok all of Kube to get productive with it (and very much got that feeling last time I explored the docs). But knowing that I can ignore a lot of that if I use some kubernetes cloud service and just put my images up there, that's super nice. Thanks (also to some sibling comments of yours) for clearly drawing up the difference between those two things.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    This is super helpful, thanks. I always had the idea that I needed to grok all of Kube to get productive with it The discoverability is still a problem with it, if no one told you e.g. about k3s you would never guess the name. Good luck :-)
ahnick 6y ago
Yes, a simple workflow is running Minikube or K3s locally for testing and then pushing it out to a managed Kubernetes platform like DigitalOcean Kubernetes. This avoids having to know any of the underlying details of setting up the Kubernetes cluster. Everything you do in terms of interacting with the cluster on Minikube will be the same as on your production managed Kubernetes. All you really need to learn is some basics around Kubernetes terminology, the kubectl command line utility, and then some of the YAML config syntax for setting up application deployments and probably an ingress into the cluster. You can also add helm into the mix if you'd like to take advantage of pre-built packages that you can install to your cluster. For example SSL certificate management or a webserver ingress like nginx-ingress.

hmottestad 6y ago

I remember trying to set up k3s a few months ago and encountered a hard error that gave zero results when googling. I don't remember the error anymore. Was not impressed though and would not call it trivial to set up.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
I use mini cube and It went pretty smoothly.