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> No one should or is using Kubernetes to run a simple LAMP stack. Yes they are. Some developer got all excited about the capabilities of k8s, and had an initi

> No one should or is using Kubernetes to run a simple LAMP stack. Yes they are. Some developer got all excited about the capabilities of k8s, and had an initial larger scope for a project, so they set it up with GKE or EKS, and it managed to provide just enough business value to barrow in like a tick that won't be going away for years. Developers get all excited for new shiny tools and chuck it into production all the time, particularly at smaller orgs.

threeseed 5y ago
> initial larger scope for a project So they weren't trying to run a simple LAMP stack then.
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  Trying and doing can be very different things.
debarshri 5y ago
I have seen smaller RoR, Django or lampstack apps being deployed on kubernetes exactly for reasons you mentioned. It is often pitch as a silver bullet for the future.
- michaelpb 5y ago
  When Boss says "my idea is gonna be HUGE, so make this go fast", you can either spend 4 hours optimize some DB queries, or you can spend 40+ hours in a broadly scoped "conversion" project and have a new thing to add to your resume, and then spend 4 hours optimizing some DB queries...
  - debarshri 5y ago
    One of the worst, bazooka in knife fight moment was when I interviewed for a company that was a medium scale direct to consumer streaming service that was built some custom resource to create one pod per user, their worst case scenario was where they would have around 1000 concurrent users.
    - alephu5 5y ago
      I worked in a Python web-scraping team doing 3 million requests per day. Their solution to manage concurrency was also one pod per crawl, each with its own DB connection. It really struck me as crazy that everyone thought this was a good idea.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Strikes me as someone buying a massive SUV, to only use it to move one bag of groceries from the store every week. Some day in the future they might suddenly have a family of 6 to feed or have to haul a boat somewhere, so better get the big, overkill car.
  - clpm4j 5y ago
    This describes ~70% of adults in the southeastern US.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    First car analogy on HN that makes sense. Well played!
  - freeopinion 5y ago
    I have personally experienced the other end of that problem, and it applies just as well to the k8s discussion. When all the kids are gone it's hard to admit you're not a soccer mom anymore and adjust to grandma mode. It can be a hard thing to trade in the Suburban for the Lincoln. Oh wait, Lincoln's aren't the cool thing so much anymore. That whole world changed while I was driving Suburbans.
danjac 5y ago
It tends to happen with startups I think because developers know the startup is likely not going to be around for long, or they will move on in a couple years anyway. So why not shoehorn whatever tech you want and have that skill in your resume? Of course now the startup will need to hire for that tech when you leave and the cycle continues...
jlaurend 5y ago
Heh, as someone who came very close to doing this (i.e. using k8s for a LAMP-stack type app at a startup), it's not just "shiny object syndrome" driving people to do this. Here's what our progression looked like: 1. Start with basic LAMP app in git that's manually deployed to an EC2 instance 2. Add in CI / CD + CodeDeploy 3. Create a staging environment 4. Dockerize local environment to keep dev environments in sync and onboard easier (really, this part's a gamechanger for a small company) 5. Ok so now we have Docker for local dev environments but stage and prod are managed separately. Can we just run our Docker containers in stage / production? When I researched step 5, the options were basically k8s or Docker swarm but Docker swarm didn't seem battle tested (for prod). k8s was clearly a nightmare for a small team to maintain so we started looking into GKE / EKS -- but EKS was still in beta. Thus we punted. We've actually started using ECS for a newer project and I'd likely go that route for step 5 instead.

threeseed 5y ago

> initial larger scope for a project So they weren't trying to run a simple LAMP stack then.

naniwaduni 5y ago
Trying and doing can be very different things.

debarshri 5y ago

I have seen smaller RoR, Django or lampstack apps being deployed on kubernetes exactly for reasons you mentioned. It is often pitch as a silver bullet for the future.

michaelpb 5y ago
When Boss says "my idea is gonna be HUGE, so make this go fast", you can either spend 4 hours optimize some DB queries, or you can spend 40+ hours in a broadly scoped "conversion" project and have a new thing to add to your resume, and then spend 4 hours optimizing some DB queries...
- debarshri 5y ago
  One of the worst, bazooka in knife fight moment was when I interviewed for a company that was a medium scale direct to consumer streaming service that was built some custom resource to create one pod per user, their worst case scenario was where they would have around 1000 concurrent users.
  - alephu5 5y ago
    I worked in a Python web-scraping team doing 3 million requests per day. Their solution to manage concurrency was also one pod per crawl, each with its own DB connection. It really struck me as crazy that everyone thought this was a good idea.
ryandrake 5y ago
Strikes me as someone buying a massive SUV, to only use it to move one bag of groceries from the store every week. Some day in the future they might suddenly have a family of 6 to feed or have to haul a boat somewhere, so better get the big, overkill car.
- clpm4j 5y ago
  This describes ~70% of adults in the southeastern US.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  First car analogy on HN that makes sense. Well played!
- freeopinion 5y ago
  I have personally experienced the other end of that problem, and it applies just as well to the k8s discussion. When all the kids are gone it's hard to admit you're not a soccer mom anymore and adjust to grandma mode. It can be a hard thing to trade in the Suburban for the Lincoln. Oh wait, Lincoln's aren't the cool thing so much anymore. That whole world changed while I was driving Suburbans.

danjac 5y ago

It tends to happen with startups I think because developers know the startup is likely not going to be around for long, or they will move on in a couple years anyway. So why not shoehorn whatever tech you want and have that skill in your resume? Of course now the startup will need to hire for that tech when you leave and the cycle continues...

jlaurend 5y ago

Heh, as someone who came very close to doing this (i.e. using k8s for a LAMP-stack type app at a startup), it's not just "shiny object syndrome" driving people to do this. Here's what our progression looked like: 1. Start with basic LAMP app in git that's manually deployed to an EC2 instance 2. Add in CI / CD + CodeDeploy 3. Create a staging environment 4. Dockerize local environment to keep dev environments in sync and onboard easier (really, this part's a gamechanger for a small company) 5. Ok so now we have Docker for local dev environments but stage and prod are managed separately. Can we just run our Docker containers in stage / production? When I researched step 5, the options were basically k8s or Docker swarm but Docker swarm didn't seem battle tested (for prod). k8s was clearly a nightmare for a small team to maintain so we started looking into GKE / EKS -- but EKS was still in beta. Thus we punted. We've actually started using ECS for a newer project and I'd likely go that route for step 5 instead.