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Your arguments are true, but you did not consider the complexity that you have now introduced in a small shop operation. You will need kubernetes knowledge and

Your arguments are true, but you did not consider the complexity that you have now introduced in a small shop operation. You will need kubernetes knowledge and experienced engineers on that matter. I would argue that the SO setup with 9 webservers, 2x2 DB servers and 2 redis servers could easily be administered with 20 year old knowledge about networks and linux/windows itself. And I also argue, lack of experience of fiddling with redundant kubernetes is a more likely source of downtime than hardware failure and keeping things simple.

mschuster91 6y ago
> You will need kubernetes knowledge and experienced engineers on that matter. For a small shop you'll need one person knowing that stuff, or you bring in an external consultant for setting up and maintaining the cluster, or you move to some cloud provider (k8s is basically a commodity that everyone and their dog offers, not just the big 3!) so you don't have to worry about that at all. And a cluster for basic stuff is not even that expensive if you do want to run your own. Three worker machines and one (or, if you want HA, two) NAS systems... half a rack and you're set. The benefit you have is your engineers will waste a lot less time setting up, maintaining and tearing down development and QA environments. As for the SO setup: the day-to-day maintenance of them should be fairly simple - but AFAIK they had to do a lot of development effort to get the cluster to that efficiency, including writing their own "tag DB".
- littlecranky67 6y ago
  You will always need 2-3 experts, because in case of an incident, your 1 engineer might be on sick/holiday leave. Well but lets walk one step back looking at SO, they are a windows shop (.NET, MS SQL Server) so I doubt k8s would be found in their setup.
- toyg 6y ago
  Ah yes, I’ll make my critical infrastructure totally dependent on some outside consultant who may or may not be around when I really need him. That sounds like a great strategy. /s
zeckalpha 6y ago
Thankfully in this case there is 13 years of knowledge in the DB itself.

mschuster91 6y ago

> You will need kubernetes knowledge and experienced engineers on that matter. For a small shop you'll need one person knowing that stuff, or you bring in an external consultant for setting up and maintaining the cluster, or you move to some cloud provider (k8s is basically a commodity that everyone and their dog offers, not just the big 3!) so you don't have to worry about that at all. And a cluster for basic stuff is not even that expensive if you do want to run your own. Three worker machines and one (or, if you want HA, two) NAS systems... half a rack and you're set. The benefit you have is your engineers will waste a lot less time setting up, maintaining and tearing down development and QA environments. As for the SO setup: the day-to-day maintenance of them should be fairly simple - but AFAIK they had to do a lot of development effort to get the cluster to that efficiency, including writing their own "tag DB".

littlecranky67 6y ago
You will always need 2-3 experts, because in case of an incident, your 1 engineer might be on sick/holiday leave. Well but lets walk one step back looking at SO, they are a windows shop (.NET, MS SQL Server) so I doubt k8s would be found in their setup.
toyg 6y ago
Ah yes, I’ll make my critical infrastructure totally dependent on some outside consultant who may or may not be around when I really need him. That sounds like a great strategy. /s

zeckalpha 6y ago

Thankfully in this case there is 13 years of knowledge in the DB itself.