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Is Kubernetes Adoption Slowing?

mountainriver 4y ago
Kubernetes is a great idea but I’m not sure it’s the end state of DIY infra, unless it’s willing to evolve more, which I haven’t seen much effort towards. The complexity can be hard to manage, there is a continuous overhead in running a cluster, and the abstractions are growing comparatively weak. Take running a basic web app, you almost certainly will use a cloud database rather than one on k8s. So now the developer needs to use terraform to provision a cloud dev then k8s to run the app. This is a huge problem point at my current organization, it’s too complicated for most developers. It’s like k8s aims to abstract everything but then just kinda fails at doing the most basic things simply. Also justifying running your own services vs using the cloud is increasingly hard. We will likely need a hybrid model in the future. That all being said k8s still does some things very well like running and linking lots of apps together.
- tveita 4y ago
  > So now the developer needs to use terraform to provision a cloud dev then k8s to run the app. The big cloud providers have Kubernetes controllers that can provision databases and other services based on Kubernetes resources, e.g. the GCP Config Connector. Your developers can pretty much do everything through k8s abstractions - given sufficiently large platform team to set it all up. https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview
  - mountainriver 4y ago
    yeah kinda, you are then using k8s as very durable storage which goes against the "cluster as cattle" principle. I've tried crossplane and ACK, both of which feel mildly terrifying to treat k8s in that manner. Terraforms way of just using any old object store feels a lot more durable and lighter
- yuppie_scum 4y ago
  This is the fairest critique of Kube I’ve seen posted - you summed up my thoughts perfectly. I think Kube is cool and better in many ways than the old ways pre Docker, or some other container orchestration platforms, but it is the ultimate in “enough rope to hang yourself” tech. Maybe evidence that a little opinionation can go a long way to help the user experience.

Kubernetes is a great idea but I’m not sure it’s the end state of DIY infra, unless it’s willing to evolve more, which I haven’t seen much effort towards. The complexity can be hard to manage, there is a continuous overhead in running a cluster, and the abstractions are growing comparatively weak. Take running a basic web app, you almost certainly will use a cloud database rather than one on k8s. So now the developer needs to use terraform to provision a cloud dev then k8s to run the app. This is a huge problem point at my current organization, it’s too complicated for most developers. It’s like k8s aims to abstract everything but then just kinda fails at doing the most basic things simply. Also justifying running your own services vs using the cloud is increasingly hard. We will likely need a hybrid model in the future. That all being said k8s still does some things very well like running and linking lots of apps together.

tveita 4y ago
> So now the developer needs to use terraform to provision a cloud dev then k8s to run the app. The big cloud providers have Kubernetes controllers that can provision databases and other services based on Kubernetes resources, e.g. the GCP Config Connector. Your developers can pretty much do everything through k8s abstractions - given sufficiently large platform team to set it all up. https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview
- mountainriver 4y ago
  yeah kinda, you are then using k8s as very durable storage which goes against the "cluster as cattle" principle. I've tried crossplane and ACK, both of which feel mildly terrifying to treat k8s in that manner. Terraforms way of just using any old object store feels a lot more durable and lighter
yuppie_scum 4y ago
This is the fairest critique of Kube I’ve seen posted - you summed up my thoughts perfectly. I think Kube is cool and better in many ways than the old ways pre Docker, or some other container orchestration platforms, but it is the ultimate in “enough rope to hang yourself” tech. Maybe evidence that a little opinionation can go a long way to help the user experience.