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I once have been told that development teams smaller than 20 developers have no business in using k8s, due to the complexity to brings. If something as essentia

by cies 6y ago

I once have been told that development teams smaller than 20 developers have no business in using k8s, due to the complexity to brings. If something as essential as the infra so complex it is not readily understood by everyone on the team, a few (more than one) team members need to become the experts on the matter. For small teams this is simply not worth it.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Definitely; if you as a company want to do Kubernetes or even cloud services (beyond the easy managed service like Beanstalk or GCE), you need to have a dedicated expert on it. Or more abstractly, one full time unit (can be distributed). If it's some guy's part time hobby it will not work.
- cies 6y ago
  I think this is what went wrong with k8s. I saw lots of interests from hobbyist, and people proposing k8s in small teams. It become often hear that "you do containers in production? use k8s!" That's just a big disappointment waiting to happen.
FridgeSeal 6y ago
As part of a small team currently using Kubernetes, I suspect it’s more how you use it - the tools and ecosystem have matured immensely in the last couple of years since I’ve first started using it. I don’t think it suits all teams and use cases, but for us it’s absolutely fantastic and without going down the rabbit-hole of cloud-provider specific tools and recreating half the issues it solves, I’m not super sure what we’d use.
- bavell 6y ago
  Agreed. I'm a solo technical founder and have been using k8s for all my hosting for 3+ years. It's so easy (for me) that I'm fine paying a premium for the managed service (GCP) since it saves me lots of time, my most valuable resource. I've already climbed most of the learning curve so YMMV, but as a team of one and dozens of WordPress, MySQL, and bespoke app servers, kuberenetes makes ops manageable so I can spend time on things that really matter. Deploying new web apps is trivial, declarative manifests are easy to reason about, TLS certs are issued and renewed automatically (cert-manager), backups are cheap and reliable (daily GCP snapshots), making changes to the cluster via declarative terraform is a breeze, etc etc. No way I could manage all the ops without leaning so heavily on the core foundation provided by k8s.
  - cies 6y ago
    Curious: do you have a single workload (like a WP site) that requires more than one physical computer in resources? I think that's the first thing with k8s: it all starts with an app that requires several physical nodes.
    - FridgeSeal 6y ago
      I’ve run a production kubernetes cluster that was hosting a DGraph cluster of 3 machines on its own, some ML workloads, and 4-5 products (each consisting of multiple services) and that was more than a single machine would have been able to handle. Well _technically_, sure, we could have run a bunch of those products on a single machine, but there goes your durability and the memory overhead on some of them was quite Hugh, and properly fitting them onto a single machine would have required more optimisation and technical skills than the devs I was working with had or were inclined to do.
    - bavell 6y ago
      As in - a single workload that can't fit on a single physical machine? No I don't, although I certainly could if I needed to. Most of my workloads are either low-traffic WP sites or bespoke web-based business tools for clients with very bursty traffic. Most of the value I get from k8s is the hands-off nature of it - I get slack notifications (prometheus+alertmanager) if anything is happening I need to address (e.g. workload down, node down, API not responding, etc). Otherwise I can safely ignore my cluster and know everything's good. Spinning up a new WP site takes 10m with backups, TLS, monitoring, etc built in.
a1369209993 6y ago
If something as essential as the infrastructure is so complex that you need a dedicated expert on it, it's bad infrastructure. To take a offhand analogy, you don't need a dedicated highway maintainance engineer in order to drive your car.

by cies 6y ago

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Definitely; if you as a company want to do Kubernetes or even cloud services (beyond the easy managed service like Beanstalk or GCE), you need to have a dedicated expert on it. Or more abstractly, one full time unit (can be distributed). If it's some guy's part time hobby it will not work.

cies 6y ago
I think this is what went wrong with k8s. I saw lots of interests from hobbyist, and people proposing k8s in small teams. It become often hear that "you do containers in production? use k8s!" That's just a big disappointment waiting to happen.

FridgeSeal 6y ago

As part of a small team currently using Kubernetes, I suspect it’s more how you use it - the tools and ecosystem have matured immensely in the last couple of years since I’ve first started using it. I don’t think it suits all teams and use cases, but for us it’s absolutely fantastic and without going down the rabbit-hole of cloud-provider specific tools and recreating half the issues it solves, I’m not super sure what we’d use.

bavell 6y ago
Agreed. I'm a solo technical founder and have been using k8s for all my hosting for 3+ years. It's so easy (for me) that I'm fine paying a premium for the managed service (GCP) since it saves me lots of time, my most valuable resource. I've already climbed most of the learning curve so YMMV, but as a team of one and dozens of WordPress, MySQL, and bespoke app servers, kuberenetes makes ops manageable so I can spend time on things that really matter. Deploying new web apps is trivial, declarative manifests are easy to reason about, TLS certs are issued and renewed automatically (cert-manager), backups are cheap and reliable (daily GCP snapshots), making changes to the cluster via declarative terraform is a breeze, etc etc. No way I could manage all the ops without leaning so heavily on the core foundation provided by k8s.
- cies 6y ago
  Curious: do you have a single workload (like a WP site) that requires more than one physical computer in resources? I think that's the first thing with k8s: it all starts with an app that requires several physical nodes.
  - FridgeSeal 6y ago
    I’ve run a production kubernetes cluster that was hosting a DGraph cluster of 3 machines on its own, some ML workloads, and 4-5 products (each consisting of multiple services) and that was more than a single machine would have been able to handle. Well _technically_, sure, we could have run a bunch of those products on a single machine, but there goes your durability and the memory overhead on some of them was quite Hugh, and properly fitting them onto a single machine would have required more optimisation and technical skills than the devs I was working with had or were inclined to do.
  - bavell 6y ago
    As in - a single workload that can't fit on a single physical machine? No I don't, although I certainly could if I needed to. Most of my workloads are either low-traffic WP sites or bespoke web-based business tools for clients with very bursty traffic. Most of the value I get from k8s is the hands-off nature of it - I get slack notifications (prometheus+alertmanager) if anything is happening I need to address (e.g. workload down, node down, API not responding, etc). Otherwise I can safely ignore my cluster and know everything's good. Spinning up a new WP site takes 10m with backups, TLS, monitoring, etc built in.

a1369209993 6y ago

If something as essential as the infrastructure is so complex that you need a dedicated expert on it, it's bad infrastructure. To take a offhand analogy, you don't need a dedicated highway maintainance engineer in order to drive your car.