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> and focus on simplicity and usability instead of just hyper scalability I don't get why people in IT need a boogeyman. Looks like "k8s is hard" is the new "p

> and focus on simplicity and usability instead of just hyper scalability I don't get why people in IT need a boogeyman. Looks like "k8s is hard" is the new "pointers are hard" we use to scare other people now.

imiric 4y ago
That's not a great comparison, but it works in a sense. Not all languages and applications benefit from pointers. The issue is not about k8s being hard. Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but many technologies do. The issue is that learning all of its intricacies, and maintaining it and the services that run on top of it, requires valuable resources many companies don't have, especially early on. And the benefits it provides are, for the most part, not needed early on in a project's lifecycle, and often never. In financial terms, it's very high risk, with low ROI. If there's a solution that lowers the investment and maintenance costs, while being valuable in the short and long term, then that's generally a more favorable solution for most projects that don't operate at Google's scale.
- IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
  There is the learning curve, which can be challenging for organizations that aren’t experienced or exposed to scale and performance expectations. When a company moves away from being insular & proprietary to using open source there is a period of churn that ripples through the deployment, implementation and day to day operations aspect of products that live either on customer premises or a cloud platform new to everyone. There, what YOU know from experience and have evolved and worked through is unknown—because it is all new. And “training” (such as it is) is left as an exercise for each individual. I’d expect that is the norm for the traditional non startup firms, globally.
chillfox 4y ago
There is a very big difference from being a user of K8s and being someone maintaining a K8s cluster. If you are a user of K8s, then yeah, deploying apps is pretty simple most of the time. Maintaining a K8s cluster on the other hand becomes very complex and hard the moment you have use cases that are a few steps off the happy path. The K8s documentation is not sufficient for operating a K8s cluster on your own hardware, you end up having to go spelunking in the code to see how things work (this is from experience).
deely3 4y ago
Concept of pointers you can explain in one sentence. K8s introduction course takes 3 hours. K8s is not hard, but complex.
- IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
  Yet stackoverflow is full of questions on pointers.
IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
Pointers are hard though, for the average programmer as is memory management. When you transition an IT team or a customer facing product support team to DevOps, most everything appears complex if the implementation has been done by engineers new to DevOps and cloud itself. Engineers with zero background in scale out or performance for larger customers. It is a cultural/experience change that faces issues at actual deployment time. I’m watching that play out at work now.

imiric 4y ago

That's not a great comparison, but it works in a sense. Not all languages and applications benefit from pointers. The issue is not about k8s being hard. Yes, it has a steep learning curve, but many technologies do. The issue is that learning all of its intricacies, and maintaining it and the services that run on top of it, requires valuable resources many companies don't have, especially early on. And the benefits it provides are, for the most part, not needed early on in a project's lifecycle, and often never. In financial terms, it's very high risk, with low ROI. If there's a solution that lowers the investment and maintenance costs, while being valuable in the short and long term, then that's generally a more favorable solution for most projects that don't operate at Google's scale.

IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
There is the learning curve, which can be challenging for organizations that aren’t experienced or exposed to scale and performance expectations. When a company moves away from being insular & proprietary to using open source there is a period of churn that ripples through the deployment, implementation and day to day operations aspect of products that live either on customer premises or a cloud platform new to everyone. There, what YOU know from experience and have evolved and worked through is unknown—because it is all new. And “training” (such as it is) is left as an exercise for each individual. I’d expect that is the norm for the traditional non startup firms, globally.

chillfox 4y ago

There is a very big difference from being a user of K8s and being someone maintaining a K8s cluster. If you are a user of K8s, then yeah, deploying apps is pretty simple most of the time. Maintaining a K8s cluster on the other hand becomes very complex and hard the moment you have use cases that are a few steps off the happy path. The K8s documentation is not sufficient for operating a K8s cluster on your own hardware, you end up having to go spelunking in the code to see how things work (this is from experience).

deely3 4y ago

Concept of pointers you can explain in one sentence. K8s introduction course takes 3 hours. K8s is not hard, but complex.

IOT_Apprentice 4y ago
Yet stackoverflow is full of questions on pointers.

IOT_Apprentice 4y ago

Pointers are hard though, for the average programmer as is memory management. When you transition an IT team or a customer facing product support team to DevOps, most everything appears complex if the implementation has been done by engineers new to DevOps and cloud itself. Engineers with zero background in scale out or performance for larger customers. It is a cultural/experience change that faces issues at actual deployment time. I’m watching that play out at work now.