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"Kubernetes is the biggest quality-of-life improvement I've experienced in my career." Can you elaborate? What exactly about Kubernetes improved the developers

by vp8989 6y ago

"Kubernetes is the biggest quality-of-life improvement I've experienced in my career." Can you elaborate? What exactly about Kubernetes improved the developers life?

yowlingcat 6y ago
Can only speak for myself personally, but having gone through a similar moment, it was 50% docker QoL improvements and 50% k8s QoL improvements -- most significantly around prod/dev parity. Every engineer in my org really did gain a significant amount of confidence around being able to spin up and deploy new services (when necessary) without being nervous about something going wrong in prod that wasn't configured properly in a lower environment.
- skinnyarms 6y ago
  I'm really happy with the local development story too. We use skaffold to pick and choose which resources we run locally, and then we use the same definition to generate our artifacts which keeps things in line. It reminds me of docker-compose file, except I can publish it too.
anchochilis 6y ago
1. Reliable rolling deployments. We didn't have these before. Yes, you can implement them without K8s (I have, at other companies) but to get the full set of features K8s provides, such as deploying N services in parallel, taking no more than X% of your capacity offline at a time, short-circuiting in the event the app is dead on arrival, connection draining with timeouts, you end up with a VERY complicated multi-threaded codebase. 2. Seamless horizontal scale-out. Want to scale up your app in a test environment from 3 replicas to 6 to do some performance testing? This used to be a DevOps ticket that would take a few days -- DevOps engineer tries running Terraform, but oh no, a CentOS package update seems to have broken our Puppet manifests and we have to fix that. Now the developer makes a PR to the GitOps repo where they adjust a single YAML setting. 3. GitOps/ArgoCD. ArgoCD is possibly my favorite piece of software of all time. It provides incredible visualizations for what's happening with your Kubernetes infrastructure. It really increases your confidence and trust in the system to be able watch a deployment rollout or scaling operation happen in real time. ArgoCD makes it spectacularly obvious when something has gone wrong -- you still sometimes need to go spelunking through the GCP console or use kubectl to inspect resources, but to a much lesser degree. I cannot emphasize enough how magical it is. These are all things that our initial implementation has delivered, we are also planning to try to leverage K8s for things like on-demand pull request preview environments, hosted developer environments, and canary deploys that are MUCH harder to implement in a world without K8s (trust me, I've done it).
- Spivak 6y ago
  You’re using hosted k8s! That explains everything! I was so confused how a devops person wasn’t cursing the name. Implementing and managing k8s is where all the complexity and headache lives.
  - anchochilis 6y ago
    Updated original comment to clarify :) Although, to be fair, the article is about GKE.
  - anthonyskipper 6y ago
    If your company is implementing and managing their own k8s clusters they are doing it wrong. Use a cloud hosted solution.
  - sontek 6y ago
    Have you seen kops? rancher? loft? I don't think its that terrible to manage k8s at all using the tools available to you. k8s definitely used to be be difficult to manage but that isn't the case anymore. But literally every cloud provider out there has a managed solution so at this point you really only need to do it for DC work or if you like to do it. Amazon - EKS Google - GKE Azure - AKS anything beyond those 3 is a rounding error but... Linode - LKE DigitalOcean - DigitalOcean Kubernetes IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Rackspace - KAAS
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I've used Rancher and while it is very nice it still punts a lot of the hard bits like interacting with the outside network, vm creation, and storage (especially shared persistent storage) to the ops team to figure out. Creating a big-ole cluster of app servers was never really the hard ops problem which is what k8s does really well.
      - sontek 6y ago
        Creating the cluster of servers isn't the value of kubernetes. We all had clusters of servers well before k8s, openstack, and things like AWS. The benefit of k8s is the orchestration of those clusters. Spinning up 6 new http servers and getting them added to the load balancer automatically. Generating 4 new memcached nodes and getting them registered in DNS so clients pick them up and add them to the hashring. The benefit of k8s is the scaling and elastic capabilities. It can trigger vertical scaling by spinning up larger pods or horizontal scaling by adding/removing pods. Anyone thinking that people are using k8s because it can create app servers doesn't understand why anyone is using k8s. If all we needed to do is create a cluster of app servers, we wouldn't be using k8s. That being said, a cluster of app servers still needs orchestration and config management and we had a ton of crazy solutions for that prior to k8s.

by vp8989 6y ago

"Kubernetes is the biggest quality-of-life improvement I've experienced in my career." Can you elaborate? What exactly about Kubernetes improved the developers life?

yowlingcat 6y ago

Can only speak for myself personally, but having gone through a similar moment, it was 50% docker QoL improvements and 50% k8s QoL improvements -- most significantly around prod/dev parity. Every engineer in my org really did gain a significant amount of confidence around being able to spin up and deploy new services (when necessary) without being nervous about something going wrong in prod that wasn't configured properly in a lower environment.

skinnyarms 6y ago
I'm really happy with the local development story too. We use skaffold to pick and choose which resources we run locally, and then we use the same definition to generate our artifacts which keeps things in line. It reminds me of docker-compose file, except I can publish it too.

anchochilis 6y ago

1. Reliable rolling deployments. We didn't have these before. Yes, you can implement them without K8s (I have, at other companies) but to get the full set of features K8s provides, such as deploying N services in parallel, taking no more than X% of your capacity offline at a time, short-circuiting in the event the app is dead on arrival, connection draining with timeouts, you end up with a VERY complicated multi-threaded codebase. 2. Seamless horizontal scale-out. Want to scale up your app in a test environment from 3 replicas to 6 to do some performance testing? This used to be a DevOps ticket that would take a few days -- DevOps engineer tries running Terraform, but oh no, a CentOS package update seems to have broken our Puppet manifests and we have to fix that. Now the developer makes a PR to the GitOps repo where they adjust a single YAML setting. 3. GitOps/ArgoCD. ArgoCD is possibly my favorite piece of software of all time. It provides incredible visualizations for what's happening with your Kubernetes infrastructure. It really increases your confidence and trust in the system to be able watch a deployment rollout or scaling operation happen in real time. ArgoCD makes it spectacularly obvious when something has gone wrong -- you still sometimes need to go spelunking through the GCP console or use kubectl to inspect resources, but to a much lesser degree. I cannot emphasize enough how magical it is. These are all things that our initial implementation has delivered, we are also planning to try to leverage K8s for things like on-demand pull request preview environments, hosted developer environments, and canary deploys that are MUCH harder to implement in a world without K8s (trust me, I've done it).

Spivak 6y ago
You’re using hosted k8s! That explains everything! I was so confused how a devops person wasn’t cursing the name. Implementing and managing k8s is where all the complexity and headache lives.
- anchochilis 6y ago
  Updated original comment to clarify :) Although, to be fair, the article is about GKE.
- anthonyskipper 6y ago
  If your company is implementing and managing their own k8s clusters they are doing it wrong. Use a cloud hosted solution.
- sontek 6y ago
  Have you seen kops? rancher? loft? I don't think its that terrible to manage k8s at all using the tools available to you. k8s definitely used to be be difficult to manage but that isn't the case anymore. But literally every cloud provider out there has a managed solution so at this point you really only need to do it for DC work or if you like to do it. Amazon - EKS Google - GKE Azure - AKS anything beyond those 3 is a rounding error but... Linode - LKE DigitalOcean - DigitalOcean Kubernetes IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Rackspace - KAAS
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I've used Rancher and while it is very nice it still punts a lot of the hard bits like interacting with the outside network, vm creation, and storage (especially shared persistent storage) to the ops team to figure out. Creating a big-ole cluster of app servers was never really the hard ops problem which is what k8s does really well.
    - sontek 6y ago
      Creating the cluster of servers isn't the value of kubernetes. We all had clusters of servers well before k8s, openstack, and things like AWS. The benefit of k8s is the orchestration of those clusters. Spinning up 6 new http servers and getting them added to the load balancer automatically. Generating 4 new memcached nodes and getting them registered in DNS so clients pick them up and add them to the hashring. The benefit of k8s is the scaling and elastic capabilities. It can trigger vertical scaling by spinning up larger pods or horizontal scaling by adding/removing pods. Anyone thinking that people are using k8s because it can create app servers doesn't understand why anyone is using k8s. If all we needed to do is create a cluster of app servers, we wouldn't be using k8s. That being said, a cluster of app servers still needs orchestration and config management and we had a ton of crazy solutions for that prior to k8s.