4 ms·

About 6 years ago I was brought in as a Azure/operation consultant to help bid on a "project". Basically a sister-company had built a webapp for a client and we

About 6 years ago I was brought in as a Azure/operation consultant to help bid on a "project". Basically a sister-company had built a webapp for a client and we where to bid on hosting and migration away from the current fly-by-night hosting partner. The specs called for a Kubernetes cluster and a Cassandra database cluster for production and the same for testing. Everything about this project was presented as being highly complex. Digging into it with the client and the developers we reduced it to: One Docker container running in Azure websites and CosmosDB on the backend, which could basically run on the free tier. The whole thing hold less than 3GB of data and had maybe a few hundred requests per day. The client just loved the idea that they where special, dealing with massive amount of data and required scalability to keep costs under control. The developers more or less just ran with it and wanted to do Kubernetes and Cassandra sounded interesting and now they had a client that would pay for it. Technically I suppose that both Kubernetes and Cassandra where reasonable choices, had they had 1000x the load, but given their market they where never going to grow beyond 10x on this particular solution. We didn't get the contract. Our bid was insanely low (not really worth the cost of bringing in a new contractor), delivered something different that asked for (fair enough).

brianwawok 3y ago
Hosted k8s to run a few docker image is almost no extra work and possibly less work than setting up your own docker hosting system. I see a small hosted k8s setup with a hosted sql server as a fine app for many things.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  True, but it's a complete waste if all you need is a single webapp and you're running it on something like Azure anyway which can just run that single Docker image. In this case you had a potential zero management environment, truly Cloud as it was meant to be, vs. managing Kubernetes, plus a database. You could go with managed Kubernetes (AKS) and a managed SQLServer, but why take on that cost? Edit: Even AKS isn't truly zero management, you need to do at least some of the work for the upgrades, so instantly more management, something you need to do, something that adds to the operational cost.
  - brianwawok 3y ago
    So that is why I said to use GCE not Azure, of course Azure is extra work ;P use GKE. I have personally never build an app that was a single docker image running. Usually I am at a min of 2. One server going down shouldn't take down prod once you even have 1 paying customer.

brianwawok 3y ago

Hosted k8s to run a few docker image is almost no extra work and possibly less work than setting up your own docker hosting system. I see a small hosted k8s setup with a hosted sql server as a fine app for many things.

mrweasel 3y ago
True, but it's a complete waste if all you need is a single webapp and you're running it on something like Azure anyway which can just run that single Docker image. In this case you had a potential zero management environment, truly Cloud as it was meant to be, vs. managing Kubernetes, plus a database. You could go with managed Kubernetes (AKS) and a managed SQLServer, but why take on that cost? Edit: Even AKS isn't truly zero management, you need to do at least some of the work for the upgrades, so instantly more management, something you need to do, something that adds to the operational cost.
- brianwawok 3y ago
  So that is why I said to use GCE not Azure, of course Azure is extra work ;P use GKE. I have personally never build an app that was a single docker image running. Usually I am at a min of 2. One server going down shouldn't take down prod once you even have 1 paying customer.