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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 manag

by 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.

by bavell 6y ago

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.