4 ms·

How long did it take him to do this setup, a year you say, and that is impressive? I am not trying to be cute here, my question comes from a genuine place of cu

by wrnr 4y ago

How long did it take him to do this setup, a year you say, and that is impressive? I am not trying to be cute here, my question comes from a genuine place of curiosity. I've love to learn to spin-up a system like that, but from the tech/sales talks I see I am made to believe this can be done in a day. Expectation management is important, if people say ops is just a solved problem then I expect this to take very little time and to be easy to learn. Maybe I am learning the wrong thing here, and should do learn Helm or something more high level.

okamiueru 4y ago
It took a year, but that was somewhat on the side of also building an OpenAPI based Web service, the gRPC based workers. So, it wasn't just the infrastructure stuff. If I were to estimate how much time for just the infrastructure and devops tooling, then two months. It's been up and running with less than 15 minute downtime over the course of two years. I do consider this impressive. And, to be clear, I wouldn't say this is because of a "super-developer". In fact, he had no prior k8s experience. But rather that there are thousand upon thousand of infrastructure hours devoted to the helm charts, often maintained by the people who develop the services themselves. It is almost mind boggling how much you get for almost free. Usually with very good and sensible default configurations. In my precious work place, we had a team of 5 good engineers purely devoted to infrastructure, and I honestly believe that all five would be able to spend their time doing much more valuable things, if k8s had existed. As for whether or not such devops solutions could be done in a day. Hm. I don't know. These things should be tailored to the problem. If you've done all of this a few times, then maybe you can adjust a bunch of charts that you are already familiar with and do what took a couple of months and impressed me, in a couple of weeks. It's a lot more than just "helm install. Done", that goes into architecting a scalable solution. Implementing monitoring, alerting and logging. Load testing stuff. Etc.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Sounds like a waste of months that could have gone into building product by choosing simpler operational tech
  - okamiueru 4y ago
    That's seems like a very negative take in my opinion. This 'simpler operational tech' would still need to be able to scale, correct? If you think that there is a good and easier way to deploying 10-15 services, all of which can scale, and all of it defined in rather neat code, to be anything but "simple operational tech", then I believe you are confusing "solving a complex problem", with "simplifying the requirements of a complex problem". The latter of which has been stripped of many important features. K8S isn't anything magic, but it certainly isn't a bad tool to use. At least not in my experience, though I've heard of horror stories. That does remind me that when that employee started, the existing "simple operational tech" was in fact to SSH into a VM and kill the process, git pull the latest changes, and start the service. The only way you can solve the actual problem (not a simplified one) would in my opinion either be k8s or terraform of some kind. The latter would mostly define the resources in the cloud provider system, most of which would map to k8s resources anyways. So, I honestly just consider k8s to better solve what terraform was made for. I'm sure the "simpler operational tech" meets few requirements for short disaster recovery. Unless you have infrastructure as code, I don't think that is possible.
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      >This 'simpler operational tech' would still need to be able to scale, correct? Only if "scaling" is the problem that your startup is solving.
      - okamiueru 4y ago
        Any startup that knows what their product is and are done with PoCs, should be able to deal with the consequence of succeeding, without failing. Scaling is one of those things that should be in place before you need it. In our case, scaling was a main concern.
        mgkimsal 4y ago
        > In our case, scaling was a main concern. and ... you might be justified in that concern. However... after having been in the web space for 25+ years, it's surprising to me how many people have this as a primary concern ("we gotta scale!") while simultaneously never coming close to having this concern be justified. I'm not saying it should be an either/or situation, but... I've lost count of how many "can it scale?" discussions I've had where "is it tested?" and "does it work?" almost never cross anyone's lips. One might say "it's assumed it's tested" or "that's a baseline requirement" but there's rarely verification of the tests, nor any effort put in to maintaining the tests as the system evolves. EDIT: so... when I hear/read "scaling is a main concern" my spidey-sense tingles a bit. It may not be wrong, but it's often not the right questions to be focused on during many of the conversations I have.
gautamdivgi 4y ago
Use a managed k8s cluster (eks, aks or gke). Creating a production ready k8s on vms or baremetal can be time consuming. Yes, you can do lamdba, serverless, etc. but k8s gives you the same thing and is generally cheaper.
BobbyJo 4y ago
You can get a majority of those things "running" in few days. If you don't want it to fall over every other day, then you need to have a ton of ancillaries which will take at least several months to set up, not to mention taking care of securing it.
sk0g 4y ago
With 1YoE I did most of that in about 3 months. Had a deadline of 6 months to get something functional to demonstrate the proposed new direction of the company, and I did just that. If I were to do it today I could probably rush it to a week, but that would mean no progress on the backend development that I was doing in parallel. A day is probably doable with more on-rails/ batteries included approaches. Not because I'm amazing, but there's a frankly ridiculous amount of information out there, and good chunks of it are high quality too. I think I started the job early January, and by April I had CI/CD, K8s for backend/frontend/DBs, Nginx (server and k8s cluster), auto-renewing certs, Sentry monitoring, Slack alerts for ops issues, K8s node rollback on failures, etc. The best way to learn, is to do. Cliche, but that's what it really comes down to. There's a fair few new concepts to grasp, and you probably have picked some of these up almost by osmosis. It sounds more overwhelming than it is, truly.
- nprateem 4y ago
  The problem is never spinning things up, it's in maintenance and ops. K8s brings tons of complexity. I wouldn't use it without thinking very carefully for anything other than a very complex startup while you're finding product-market fit.
neurostimulant 4y ago
It's actually pretty easy to do these days, even on bare metal servers. My go to setup for a small bare metal k8s cluster: - initial nodes setup: networking configuration (private and public network), sshd setup (disallow password login), setting up docker, prepping an NFS share accessible on every nodes via private network - install RKE and deploy the cluster, deploy nginx ingress controller - (optional) install rancher to get the rest of the goodies (graphana, istio, etc). These ate a lot of resources though, so I usually don't do this for small clusters Done in a single afternoon.
status_quo69 4y ago
Having very recently done this (almost, another dev had half time on it) solo, It's not _too_ terrible if you go with a hosted offering. Took about a month/month and a half to really get set up and has been running without much of a blip for about 5 months now. Didn't include things like dynamic/elastic scaling, but did include CD, persistent volumes, and a whole slew of terraform to get the rest of AWS set up (VPCs, RDS, etc). I'd say that it was fairly easy because I tinkered with things in my spare time, so I had a good base to work off of when reading docs and setting things up, so YMMV. My super hot take, if you go hosted and you ignore a ton of the marketing speak on OSS geared towards k8s, you'll probably be a-ok. K8s IME is as complex as you make it. If you layer things in gradually but be very conservative with what you pull in, it'll be fairly straightforward. My otherhot take is to not use helm but rather something like jsonnet or even cue to generate your yaml. My preference is jsonnet because you can very easily make a nice OO interface for the yaml schemas with it. Helm's approach to templating makes for a bit of a mess to try and read, and the values.yml files _really_ leak the details.

by wrnr 4y ago

okamiueru 4y ago

It took a year, but that was somewhat on the side of also building an OpenAPI based Web service, the gRPC based workers. So, it wasn't just the infrastructure stuff. If I were to estimate how much time for just the infrastructure and devops tooling, then two months. It's been up and running with less than 15 minute downtime over the course of two years. I do consider this impressive. And, to be clear, I wouldn't say this is because of a "super-developer". In fact, he had no prior k8s experience. But rather that there are thousand upon thousand of infrastructure hours devoted to the helm charts, often maintained by the people who develop the services themselves. It is almost mind boggling how much you get for almost free. Usually with very good and sensible default configurations. In my precious work place, we had a team of 5 good engineers purely devoted to infrastructure, and I honestly believe that all five would be able to spend their time doing much more valuable things, if k8s had existed. As for whether or not such devops solutions could be done in a day. Hm. I don't know. These things should be tailored to the problem. If you've done all of this a few times, then maybe you can adjust a bunch of charts that you are already familiar with and do what took a couple of months and impressed me, in a couple of weeks. It's a lot more than just "helm install. Done", that goes into architecting a scalable solution. Implementing monitoring, alerting and logging. Load testing stuff. Etc.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
Sounds like a waste of months that could have gone into building product by choosing simpler operational tech
- okamiueru 4y ago
  That's seems like a very negative take in my opinion. This 'simpler operational tech' would still need to be able to scale, correct? If you think that there is a good and easier way to deploying 10-15 services, all of which can scale, and all of it defined in rather neat code, to be anything but "simple operational tech", then I believe you are confusing "solving a complex problem", with "simplifying the requirements of a complex problem". The latter of which has been stripped of many important features. K8S isn't anything magic, but it certainly isn't a bad tool to use. At least not in my experience, though I've heard of horror stories. That does remind me that when that employee started, the existing "simple operational tech" was in fact to SSH into a VM and kill the process, git pull the latest changes, and start the service. The only way you can solve the actual problem (not a simplified one) would in my opinion either be k8s or terraform of some kind. The latter would mostly define the resources in the cloud provider system, most of which would map to k8s resources anyways. So, I honestly just consider k8s to better solve what terraform was made for. I'm sure the "simpler operational tech" meets few requirements for short disaster recovery. Unless you have infrastructure as code, I don't think that is possible.
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    >This 'simpler operational tech' would still need to be able to scale, correct? Only if "scaling" is the problem that your startup is solving.
    - okamiueru 4y ago
      Any startup that knows what their product is and are done with PoCs, should be able to deal with the consequence of succeeding, without failing. Scaling is one of those things that should be in place before you need it. In our case, scaling was a main concern.
      - mgkimsal 4y ago
        > In our case, scaling was a main concern. and ... you might be justified in that concern. However... after having been in the web space for 25+ years, it's surprising to me how many people have this as a primary concern ("we gotta scale!") while simultaneously never coming close to having this concern be justified. I'm not saying it should be an either/or situation, but... I've lost count of how many "can it scale?" discussions I've had where "is it tested?" and "does it work?" almost never cross anyone's lips. One might say "it's assumed it's tested" or "that's a baseline requirement" but there's rarely verification of the tests, nor any effort put in to maintaining the tests as the system evolves. EDIT: so... when I hear/read "scaling is a main concern" my spidey-sense tingles a bit. It may not be wrong, but it's often not the right questions to be focused on during many of the conversations I have.

gautamdivgi 4y ago

Use a managed k8s cluster (eks, aks or gke). Creating a production ready k8s on vms or baremetal can be time consuming. Yes, you can do lamdba, serverless, etc. but k8s gives you the same thing and is generally cheaper.

BobbyJo 4y ago

You can get a majority of those things "running" in few days. If you don't want it to fall over every other day, then you need to have a ton of ancillaries which will take at least several months to set up, not to mention taking care of securing it.

sk0g 4y ago

With 1YoE I did most of that in about 3 months. Had a deadline of 6 months to get something functional to demonstrate the proposed new direction of the company, and I did just that. If I were to do it today I could probably rush it to a week, but that would mean no progress on the backend development that I was doing in parallel. A day is probably doable with more on-rails/ batteries included approaches. Not because I'm amazing, but there's a frankly ridiculous amount of information out there, and good chunks of it are high quality too. I think I started the job early January, and by April I had CI/CD, K8s for backend/frontend/DBs, Nginx (server and k8s cluster), auto-renewing certs, Sentry monitoring, Slack alerts for ops issues, K8s node rollback on failures, etc. The best way to learn, is to do. Cliche, but that's what it really comes down to. There's a fair few new concepts to grasp, and you probably have picked some of these up almost by osmosis. It sounds more overwhelming than it is, truly.

nprateem 4y ago
The problem is never spinning things up, it's in maintenance and ops. K8s brings tons of complexity. I wouldn't use it without thinking very carefully for anything other than a very complex startup while you're finding product-market fit.

neurostimulant 4y ago

It's actually pretty easy to do these days, even on bare metal servers. My go to setup for a small bare metal k8s cluster: - initial nodes setup: networking configuration (private and public network), sshd setup (disallow password login), setting up docker, prepping an NFS share accessible on every nodes via private network - install RKE and deploy the cluster, deploy nginx ingress controller - (optional) install rancher to get the rest of the goodies (graphana, istio, etc). These ate a lot of resources though, so I usually don't do this for small clusters Done in a single afternoon.

status_quo69 4y ago

Having very recently done this (almost, another dev had half time on it) solo, It's not _too_ terrible if you go with a hosted offering. Took about a month/month and a half to really get set up and has been running without much of a blip for about 5 months now. Didn't include things like dynamic/elastic scaling, but did include CD, persistent volumes, and a whole slew of terraform to get the rest of AWS set up (VPCs, RDS, etc). I'd say that it was fairly easy because I tinkered with things in my spare time, so I had a good base to work off of when reading docs and setting things up, so YMMV. My super hot take, if you go hosted and you ignore a ton of the marketing speak on OSS geared towards k8s, you'll probably be a-ok. K8s IME is as complex as you make it. If you layer things in gradually but be very conservative with what you pull in, it'll be fairly straightforward. My otherhot take is to not use helm but rather something like jsonnet or even cue to generate your yaml. My preference is jsonnet because you can very easily make a nice OO interface for the yaml schemas with it. Helm's approach to templating makes for a bit of a mess to try and read, and the values.yml files _really_ leak the details.