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I suppose I’m the guy pushing k8s on midsized companies. If there have been unhappy engineers along the way - they’ve by the vast majority stayed quiet and lied

I suppose I’m the guy pushing k8s on midsized companies. If there have been unhappy engineers along the way - they’ve by the vast majority stayed quiet and lied about being happier on surveys. Yes, k8s is complex. The tool matches the problem: complex. But having a standard is so much better than having a somewhat simpler undocumented chaos. “Kubectl explain X” is a thousand times better than even AWS documentation, which in turn was a game changer compared to that-one-whiteboard-above-Dave’s-desk. Standards are tricky, but worth the effort. Personally I’m also very judicious with operators and CRDs - both can be somewhat hidden to beginners. However, the operator pattern is wonderful. Another amazing feature is ultra simple leader election - genuinely difficult outside of k8s, a 5 minute task inside. I agree with Paul’s take here tho of at least being extremely careful about which operators you introduce. At any rate, yes k8s is more complex than your bash deploy script, of course it is. It’s also much more capable and works the same way as it did at all your developers previous jobs. Velocity is the name of the game!

paulgb 3y ago
Good point about k8s vs. AWS docs — a lot of the time people say “just use ECS” or the AWS service of the day, and it will invariably be more confusing to me and more vendor-tied than just doing the thing in k8s.
- p_l 3y ago
  And then if you're unlucky you might hit one of the areas where the AWS documentation has a "teaser" about some functionality that is critical for your project, you spend months looking for the rest of the documentation when initial foray doesn't work, and the highly paid AWS-internal consultants disappear into thin air when asked about the features. So nearly a year later you end up writing the whole feature from scratch yourself.
pclmulqdq 3y ago
I have to say that I don't believe the problem is all that complex unless you make it hard. But on the flip side, if you're a competent Kubernetes person, the correct Kubernetes config is also not that complex. I think a lot of the reaction here is a result of the age-old issues of "management is pushing software on me that I don't want" and people adopting it without knowing how to use it because it's considered a "best practice." In other words, the reaction you probably have to an Oracle database is the same reaction that others have to Kubernetes (although Oracle databases are objectively crappy).

paulgb 3y ago

Good point about k8s vs. AWS docs — a lot of the time people say “just use ECS” or the AWS service of the day, and it will invariably be more confusing to me and more vendor-tied than just doing the thing in k8s.

p_l 3y ago
And then if you're unlucky you might hit one of the areas where the AWS documentation has a "teaser" about some functionality that is critical for your project, you spend months looking for the rest of the documentation when initial foray doesn't work, and the highly paid AWS-internal consultants disappear into thin air when asked about the features. So nearly a year later you end up writing the whole feature from scratch yourself.

pclmulqdq 3y ago

I have to say that I don't believe the problem is all that complex unless you make it hard. But on the flip side, if you're a competent Kubernetes person, the correct Kubernetes config is also not that complex. I think a lot of the reaction here is a result of the age-old issues of "management is pushing software on me that I don't want" and people adopting it without knowing how to use it because it's considered a "best practice." In other words, the reaction you probably have to an Oracle database is the same reaction that others have to Kubernetes (although Oracle databases are objectively crappy).