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To this day, I cannot tell what Kubernetes is designed to do. I hear about it constantly from this website, and based on the conversations you would think it wa

To this day, I cannot tell what Kubernetes is designed to do. I hear about it constantly from this website, and based on the conversations you would think it was designed to do anything and everything, and all at the same time.

GauntletWizard 3y ago
There's a ton of hype around k8s and tons of people positing it as a solution for everything under the sun. It's not. It's a good building block for everything under the sun, if and when you need the scale of "More than one team that doesn't want to get paged in the middle of the night". A ton of the solutions built on top of it are terrible. What K8s is good at - Running collections of stateless application servers. If you have a dozen copies of the same process that are all identical, K8s is right for you. There's a lot more it can do, but that's the one that is most common.
jeroenhd 3y ago
If you need to host (hundred of) thousands of servers across the globe with an uptime indicated by more nines than sense, Kubernetes makes a lot of sense. You still need to write the tool that configures Kubernetes (you can't get away with manually written YAML at scale) but it solves a lot of problems, like "what happens when the master node goes down" and "how do we redirect to a fallback server without overloading the nodes" at the cost of spare, reserved capacity and compute+networking+memory overhead. If you're hosting things like emergency services support, the extra spend and complexity can be worth it. It can even be worth it as a band-aid if your application isn't particularly stable and you want to increase uptime while you fight for developer capacity to fix the underlying design problems. If all of your IT team already understands Kubernetes, it may even be worth it to run it in scenarios where you want to set up and tear down quick development/test environments, assuming your company doesn't mind spending extra on Kubernetes specialists once the current IT team leaves. It kind of was designed to be able to do anything and everything if you plug enough components into each other. That's probably why it's complex to the point of unusability; a framework that's designed to support an IRC server network ad much as it's designed to support MRI machines is very demanding for the people configuring it. I think the problematic part is that many people portray it as "just fancy Docker that does most of the work for you". Once the cluster is set up, that's practically what it does, but the first time setup of Kubernetes is YAML spaghetti hell, and learning about tools upon tools upon YAML.

GauntletWizard 3y ago

There's a ton of hype around k8s and tons of people positing it as a solution for everything under the sun. It's not. It's a good building block for everything under the sun, if and when you need the scale of "More than one team that doesn't want to get paged in the middle of the night". A ton of the solutions built on top of it are terrible. What K8s is good at - Running collections of stateless application servers. If you have a dozen copies of the same process that are all identical, K8s is right for you. There's a lot more it can do, but that's the one that is most common.

jeroenhd 3y ago

If you need to host (hundred of) thousands of servers across the globe with an uptime indicated by more nines than sense, Kubernetes makes a lot of sense. You still need to write the tool that configures Kubernetes (you can't get away with manually written YAML at scale) but it solves a lot of problems, like "what happens when the master node goes down" and "how do we redirect to a fallback server without overloading the nodes" at the cost of spare, reserved capacity and compute+networking+memory overhead. If you're hosting things like emergency services support, the extra spend and complexity can be worth it. It can even be worth it as a band-aid if your application isn't particularly stable and you want to increase uptime while you fight for developer capacity to fix the underlying design problems. If all of your IT team already understands Kubernetes, it may even be worth it to run it in scenarios where you want to set up and tear down quick development/test environments, assuming your company doesn't mind spending extra on Kubernetes specialists once the current IT team leaves. It kind of was designed to be able to do anything and everything if you plug enough components into each other. That's probably why it's complex to the point of unusability; a framework that's designed to support an IRC server network ad much as it's designed to support MRI machines is very demanding for the people configuring it. I think the problematic part is that many people portray it as "just fancy Docker that does most of the work for you". Once the cluster is set up, that's practically what it does, but the first time setup of Kubernetes is YAML spaghetti hell, and learning about tools upon tools upon YAML.