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Ask HN: Will my sysadmin skills make learning Kubernetes easier?

I'm a developer and sysadmin and only have experience working and managing my own raw metal servers. Will any of these skills transfer over to learning Kubernetes? Or will it be a hindrance and I need to "unlearn" a lot?

bediger4000 4y ago
I don't think system admin skills will be much help. Using Kubernetes isn't much like system admin. The whole point of it is to automatically manage a ton of resources. Pods are even more cattle than VMs, and infinitely more disposable. A lot of the solutions to pod problems is to let kubernetes restart them. System administrators work to prevent problems. Pods are also typically single purpose, rather than general purpose like a bare metal machine. System admin knowledge isn't required. I don't think you need to unlearn a lot, but you do need to accept a different mindset, that of horizontal scaling and disposablility. There's tons of people, me included, who run a server as a hobby. Almost nobody runs kubernetes as a hobby. It's like Hadoop - only corporations can love it.
- icedchai 4y ago
  sysadmin skills will definitely help if you install kubernetes (for example, on a bare metal cluster.) Operating / managing k8s is definitely its own world though. FYI, I do run k8s at home, in my home lab.
  - bediger4000 4y ago
    Hey good for you! What did you install, and how did you install it? I did a 4 raspberry pi "cluster" last year, but I couldn't figure out what to run on it after a few test pods, so I disassembled it.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      I have 2 clusters, a bare metal cluster running on ARM SBCs (6x "Rock64" boards), and a 6x VM cluster run on Debian. I have a ton of spare hardware capacity, you could say. I'm not running much on it, just some postgres instances, ceph storage, grafana dashboards, and some custom apps. I installed it from scratch with kubeadm. I'm using calico for networking, and metallb for load balancing. The clusters are set up for HA, using haproxy.
yuppie_scum 4y ago
They won’t hurt

bediger4000 4y ago

I don't think system admin skills will be much help. Using Kubernetes isn't much like system admin. The whole point of it is to automatically manage a ton of resources. Pods are even more cattle than VMs, and infinitely more disposable. A lot of the solutions to pod problems is to let kubernetes restart them. System administrators work to prevent problems. Pods are also typically single purpose, rather than general purpose like a bare metal machine. System admin knowledge isn't required. I don't think you need to unlearn a lot, but you do need to accept a different mindset, that of horizontal scaling and disposablility. There's tons of people, me included, who run a server as a hobby. Almost nobody runs kubernetes as a hobby. It's like Hadoop - only corporations can love it.

icedchai 4y ago
sysadmin skills will definitely help if you install kubernetes (for example, on a bare metal cluster.) Operating / managing k8s is definitely its own world though. FYI, I do run k8s at home, in my home lab.
- bediger4000 4y ago
  Hey good for you! What did you install, and how did you install it? I did a 4 raspberry pi "cluster" last year, but I couldn't figure out what to run on it after a few test pods, so I disassembled it.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    I have 2 clusters, a bare metal cluster running on ARM SBCs (6x "Rock64" boards), and a 6x VM cluster run on Debian. I have a ton of spare hardware capacity, you could say. I'm not running much on it, just some postgres instances, ceph storage, grafana dashboards, and some custom apps. I installed it from scratch with kubeadm. I'm using calico for networking, and metallb for load balancing. The clusters are set up for HA, using haproxy.

yuppie_scum 4y ago

They won’t hurt