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I think so, as long as you're using a managed cluster on a cloud that has automatic handling of Ingress and LoadBalancer. My first production experience with it

I think so, as long as you're using a managed cluster on a cloud that has automatic handling of Ingress and LoadBalancer. My first production experience with it was at a start-up with 3 initial engineering staff. We already knew how to build docker containers. A basic helm chart was easy to create and push to the container registry. All we needed to do was set the kubeconfig and helm install v0.1. Even if you're not sure how it all works under the covers, your tiny team is pushing to dev cluster several times a day, and your dev site is online (you can hide it behind Cloudflare Access for free). Extras like Cluster Autoscaling, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, ExternDNS and cert-manager are easy to add when you need to. Anyone can fumble-install Grafana/Prometheus/Loki and have metrics and logs. At that point you have elastic infrastructure, dashboards, alerts, TLS, LoadBalancers, DNS... How long would a small developer team take to do this without k8s? Imagine trying to figure out ECS, Fargate, Lambda, ACM, CloudWatch logs, alarms and metrics? And how much AWS-specific code is in every single one of your services to get it to work on native AWS?

kilburn 4y ago
> Imagine trying to figure out ECS, Fargate, Lambda, ACM, CloudWatch logs, alarms and metrics? In case anyone is curious, we went that route. - ECS + Fargate + CDK took one of us two (8h/day) weeks for the initial setup. We've sprinkled a few more days here and there since then. - Cloudwatch logs are "setup-free" (your containers' logs get sent there by default when using CDK constructs). - ACM... we don't use directly. CDK will easily setup TLS-enabled (with AWS-emitted certificates) ALB (Application Load Balancer(s)) for you. - Lambdas we don't use much. - Metrics & Alarms are easy to set up but they generally suck. The custom language for computed metrics is clumsy and quite limited. The anomaly detection sucks. And it is expensive even by cloud standards (don't create metrics and alarms willy-nilly or you'll feel it in the next invoice). - Our application code doesn't know much about AWS (we do use libraries for S3 and SES, but these are just easy to swap adapters). - We ended up with ~3k lines of CDK definitions in typescript. These are very easy to read, and only moderately hard to write (you do need to look up the docs). However, I can say without a doubt that it's been the easiest infrastructure definition/description language that I've ever used. I don't have enough experience with K8s to know whether that route would have been better or worse, but I can say this route hasn't been a pain point for us.
- raffraffraff 4y ago
  Good to hear. CDK is a huge plus.

kilburn 4y ago

> Imagine trying to figure out ECS, Fargate, Lambda, ACM, CloudWatch logs, alarms and metrics? In case anyone is curious, we went that route. - ECS + Fargate + CDK took one of us two (8h/day) weeks for the initial setup. We've sprinkled a few more days here and there since then. - Cloudwatch logs are "setup-free" (your containers' logs get sent there by default when using CDK constructs). - ACM... we don't use directly. CDK will easily setup TLS-enabled (with AWS-emitted certificates) ALB (Application Load Balancer(s)) for you. - Lambdas we don't use much. - Metrics & Alarms are easy to set up but they generally suck. The custom language for computed metrics is clumsy and quite limited. The anomaly detection sucks. And it is expensive even by cloud standards (don't create metrics and alarms willy-nilly or you'll feel it in the next invoice). - Our application code doesn't know much about AWS (we do use libraries for S3 and SES, but these are just easy to swap adapters). - We ended up with ~3k lines of CDK definitions in typescript. These are very easy to read, and only moderately hard to write (you do need to look up the docs). However, I can say without a doubt that it's been the easiest infrastructure definition/description language that I've ever used. I don't have enough experience with K8s to know whether that route would have been better or worse, but I can say this route hasn't been a pain point for us.

raffraffraff 4y ago
Good to hear. CDK is a huge plus.