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I suspect a lot of the gripes and grousing about Kubernetes comes from SMEs trying to run it themselves. That will often result in pain and cost. Kubernetes is

by kitd 4y ago

I suspect a lot of the gripes and grousing about Kubernetes comes from SMEs trying to run it themselves. That will often result in pain and cost. Kubernetes is a perfectly good platform for any size operation, but until you are a large org, just use a managed service from Google/Amazon/DigitalOcean/whoever. Kubernetes, the data plane, is really no more complex that eg Docker Compose, and with managed services, the control plane won't bother you. K8s allows composability of apps/services/authentication/monitoring/logging/etc in a standardised way, much more so than any roll-your-own or 3rd-party alternative IMO, the OSS ecosystem around it is large and getting larger, and the "StackOverflowability" is strong too (ie you can look up the answers to most questions easily). So, TLDR, just use a managed K8s until you properly need your own cluster.

mbonca 4y ago
Exactly! I chose k8s managed by Google years ago. As a solo developer you can have a cluster up and running with a web server, fronted by a Google LB with Google managed certificates in under an hour. Just follow one of the hundred tutorials. Just as quick and easy as setting up a single VM. But that really isn't the point is it. If that is all I needed, yes I'd use a $10 VPS. But for an "application", not a web site, you always need more. My k8s "cluster" is a single node that doesn't cost me any more than a VM would. I don't need the scalability at the moment. But I do need different environments for dev, qa, and prod. And all three are running identically next to each other using Namespaces. Saved us a ton of maintenance and cost. Any project that grows has its needs change. GKE gives you a ton of integrated tools right from the start including logging, alerting, metrics, easy access to hosted databases, pub/sub, object storage, easy and automatic network setup, easy firewall setup, dns management, and a lot more. k8s is no different than using any other hosted service. It provides a great set of features that you configure using fairly consistent yaml configuration files. And it is all accessible from the web based "Google Console" as well. Learning the k8s yaml format and some basic kubectl commands is all you need to get going and it saves a TON of time that can go back into developing your application rather than dealing with configuring disparate pieces with their own configuration methods. I was fairly early to k8s while they were still competing with other similar solutions and other tools like Puppet and Chef. I tested all of them and truthfully, k8s was the easiest to learn, implement, and maintain my app with. Using GKE of course. I would NEVER as a one man or even small team of developers take on managing an installation of k8s myself.

by kitd 4y ago

mbonca 4y ago

Exactly! I chose k8s managed by Google years ago. As a solo developer you can have a cluster up and running with a web server, fronted by a Google LB with Google managed certificates in under an hour. Just follow one of the hundred tutorials. Just as quick and easy as setting up a single VM. But that really isn't the point is it. If that is all I needed, yes I'd use a $10 VPS. But for an "application", not a web site, you always need more. My k8s "cluster" is a single node that doesn't cost me any more than a VM would. I don't need the scalability at the moment. But I do need different environments for dev, qa, and prod. And all three are running identically next to each other using Namespaces. Saved us a ton of maintenance and cost. Any project that grows has its needs change. GKE gives you a ton of integrated tools right from the start including logging, alerting, metrics, easy access to hosted databases, pub/sub, object storage, easy and automatic network setup, easy firewall setup, dns management, and a lot more. k8s is no different than using any other hosted service. It provides a great set of features that you configure using fairly consistent yaml configuration files. And it is all accessible from the web based "Google Console" as well. Learning the k8s yaml format and some basic kubectl commands is all you need to get going and it saves a TON of time that can go back into developing your application rather than dealing with configuring disparate pieces with their own configuration methods. I was fairly early to k8s while they were still competing with other similar solutions and other tools like Puppet and Chef. I tested all of them and truthfully, k8s was the easiest to learn, implement, and maintain my app with. Using GKE of course. I would NEVER as a one man or even small team of developers take on managing an installation of k8s myself.