5 ms·

I think some are just pretty sick and tired of the explosion of needless complexity we've seen in the last decade or so in software, and rightly so. This is an

I think some are just pretty sick and tired of the explosion of needless complexity we've seen in the last decade or so in software, and rightly so. This is an industry-wide problem of deeply misaligned incentives (& some amount of ZIRP gold rush), not specific to this particular case - if this one is even a good example of this to begin with. Honestly, as it stands, I think we'd be seen as pretty useless craftsmen in any other field due to an unhealthy obsession of our tooling and meta-work - consistently throwing any kind of sensible resource usage out of the window in favor of just getting to work with certain tooling. It's some kind of a "Temporarily embarrassed FAANG engineer" situation.

cwiggs 2y ago
I agree with this somewhat. The other day I was driving home and I saw a sprinkler head and broke on the side of the road and was spraying water everywhere. It made me think, why aren't sprinkler systems designed with HA in mind? Why aren't there dual water lines with dual sprinkler heads everywhere with an electronic component that detects a break in a line and automatically switches to the backup water line? It's because the downside of having the water spray everywhere, the grass become unhealthy or die is less than how much it would cost to deploy it HA. In the software/tech industry it's common place to just accept that your app can't be down for any amount of time no matter what. No one checked to see how much more it would cost (engineering time & infra costs) to deploy the app so it would be HA, so no one checked to see if it would be worth it. I blame this logic on the low interest rates for a decade. I could be wrong.
- loire280 2y ago
  This week we had a few minutes of downtime on an internal service because of a node rotation that triggered an alert. The responding engineer started to put together a plan to make the service HA (which would have tripled the cost to serve). I asked how frequently the service went down and how many people would be inconvenienced if it did. They didn't know, but when we checked the metrics it had single-digit minutes of downtime this year and fewer than a dozen daily users. We bumped the threshold on the alert to longer than it takes for a pod to be re-scheduled and resolved the ticket.
  - jack_riminton 2y ago
    This is most sensible thing I’ve read on here in a while. Engineers’ obsession with tinkering and perfection is the slow death of many startups. If you’re doing something important like banking or air traffic control fair enough but a CRUD app for booking hair appointments will survive a bit of downtime
- fragmede 2y ago
  Why would wanting redundancy be a ZIRP? Is blaming everything on ZIRP like Mercury was in retrograde but for economics dorks?
  - felixgallo 2y ago
    Because the company overhired to the point where people were sitting around dreaming up useless features just to justify their workday.
  - consteval 2y ago
    It depends on the cost of complexity you're adding. Adding another database or whatever is really not that complex so yeah sure, go for it. But a lot of companies are building distributed systems purely because they want this ultra-low downtime. Distributed systems are HARD. You get an entire set of problems you don't get otherwise, and the complexity explodes. Often, in my opinion, this is not justified. Saving a few minutes of downtime in exchange for making your application orders of magnitude more complex is just not worth it. Distributed systems solve distributed problems. They're overkill if you just want better uptime or crisis recovery. You can do that with a monolith and a database and get 99.99% of the way there. That's good enough.
  - addaon 2y ago
    Redundancy, like most engineering choices, is a cost/benefit tradeoff. If the costs are distorted, the result of the tradeoff study will be distorted from the decisions that would be made in "more normal" times.
- zerkten 2y ago
  You assume that the teams running these systems achieve acceptable uptime and companies aren't making refunds for missed uptime targets when contracts enforce that, or losing customers. There is definitely a vision for HA at many companies, but they are struggling with and without k8s.
bobobob420 2y ago
Any software engineer who thinks K8 is complex shouldn’t be a software engineer. It’s really not that hard to manage.
- LordKeren 2y ago
  I think the key word is “needless” in terms of complexity. There are a lot of k8 projects that probably could benefit from a simpler orchestration system— especially at smaller firms
  - fragmede 2y ago
    do you have a simpler orchestration system you'd recommend?
    - qohen 2y ago
      Nomad, from Hashicorp, comes to mind. https://www.nomadproject.io/ https://www.nomadproject.io/ https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad
      - ahoka 2y ago
        How is it more simple?
        Ramiro 2y ago
        Every time I read about Nomad, I wonder the same. I swear I'm not trolling here, I honestly don't get how running Nomad is simpler than Kubernetes. Especially considering that there are substantially more resources and help on Kubernetes than Nomad.
        qohen 2y ago
        Well, for starters, you don't have to have your apps containerized to work with Nomad (though it can handle containers as well as executables). But for some deeper details, I'd suggest checking out the comments in this reddit thread[0] (as well as some of the linked articles therein). E.g. From a comment by /u/Golden_Age_Fallacy: A great use of Nomad is on reduce the burden of on-boarding a team(s) of developers who are unfamiliar with cloud native deployments / systems(even containers!). Nomad jobspecs are very simple and straight forward, as compared to the complexity and pure option overload you get in k8s and helm. From /u/neutralized: It's much easier to use than k8s. Easy to setup, easy to manage, much more shallow learning curve. Nothing super fancy. Just works. I migrated a startup I was at off of a self-managed k8s setup to Nomad a few years ago and they've never looked back. From /u/esity: My team is currently building out a fully automated nomad cluster service offering internally(fortune 10) It's super awesome. Easy. Little headache. Integrates with consul and vault. We are literally planning to replace thousands of vms for K8s with nomad. Containers are faster, more resilient and writing hcl is actually fun once you learn it Now, there is a rather more lengthy comment, by /u/thomasbuchinger, that goes through the pros and cons he experienced in trying Nomad out and his conclusion is that, while he wouldn't discourage anyone from using it, "k3s and a few well-known simple projects give you 80% of Nomands [sic] features. Are as easy to operate, afford you more options in the future and have a ton of documentation/tutorials...available." There are more comments in the thread and again links to a bunch of blogposts/articles/etc., including one from fly.io that seemed pretty detailed, discussing the Googly origins of both k8s and Nomad (fly.io used Nomad but found that it wasn't the best fit for them, which is also discussed in their post -- actually, I'm going to put the link to their post below[1], since I think it is worthwhile). Hope all this helps. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/11nsxo3/opinions_on_hashicorp_nomad https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/11nsxo3/opinions_on... [1] https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchestrator/ https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...
methodical 2y ago
Fair point but I think the key point here is unnecessary complexity versus necessary complexity. Are zero-downtime deployments and load balancing unnecessary? Perhaps for a personal project, but for any company with a consistent userbase I'd argue these are a non-negotiable, or should be anyways. In a situation where this is the expectation, k8s seems like the simplest answer, or near enough to it.
- iTokio 2y ago
  They are many ways to do deployments without downtime and load balancing is easy to configure without k8s.
darby_nine 2y ago
> It's some kind of a "Temporarily embarrassed FAANG engineer" situation. FAANG engineers made the same mistake, too, even though the analogy implies comparative competency or value.

cwiggs 2y ago

I agree with this somewhat. The other day I was driving home and I saw a sprinkler head and broke on the side of the road and was spraying water everywhere. It made me think, why aren't sprinkler systems designed with HA in mind? Why aren't there dual water lines with dual sprinkler heads everywhere with an electronic component that detects a break in a line and automatically switches to the backup water line? It's because the downside of having the water spray everywhere, the grass become unhealthy or die is less than how much it would cost to deploy it HA. In the software/tech industry it's common place to just accept that your app can't be down for any amount of time no matter what. No one checked to see how much more it would cost (engineering time & infra costs) to deploy the app so it would be HA, so no one checked to see if it would be worth it. I blame this logic on the low interest rates for a decade. I could be wrong.

loire280 2y ago
This week we had a few minutes of downtime on an internal service because of a node rotation that triggered an alert. The responding engineer started to put together a plan to make the service HA (which would have tripled the cost to serve). I asked how frequently the service went down and how many people would be inconvenienced if it did. They didn't know, but when we checked the metrics it had single-digit minutes of downtime this year and fewer than a dozen daily users. We bumped the threshold on the alert to longer than it takes for a pod to be re-scheduled and resolved the ticket.
- jack_riminton 2y ago
  This is most sensible thing I’ve read on here in a while. Engineers’ obsession with tinkering and perfection is the slow death of many startups. If you’re doing something important like banking or air traffic control fair enough but a CRUD app for booking hair appointments will survive a bit of downtime
fragmede 2y ago
Why would wanting redundancy be a ZIRP? Is blaming everything on ZIRP like Mercury was in retrograde but for economics dorks?
- felixgallo 2y ago
  Because the company overhired to the point where people were sitting around dreaming up useless features just to justify their workday.
- consteval 2y ago
  It depends on the cost of complexity you're adding. Adding another database or whatever is really not that complex so yeah sure, go for it. But a lot of companies are building distributed systems purely because they want this ultra-low downtime. Distributed systems are HARD. You get an entire set of problems you don't get otherwise, and the complexity explodes. Often, in my opinion, this is not justified. Saving a few minutes of downtime in exchange for making your application orders of magnitude more complex is just not worth it. Distributed systems solve distributed problems. They're overkill if you just want better uptime or crisis recovery. You can do that with a monolith and a database and get 99.99% of the way there. That's good enough.
- addaon 2y ago
  Redundancy, like most engineering choices, is a cost/benefit tradeoff. If the costs are distorted, the result of the tradeoff study will be distorted from the decisions that would be made in "more normal" times.
zerkten 2y ago
You assume that the teams running these systems achieve acceptable uptime and companies aren't making refunds for missed uptime targets when contracts enforce that, or losing customers. There is definitely a vision for HA at many companies, but they are struggling with and without k8s.

bobobob420 2y ago

Any software engineer who thinks K8 is complex shouldn’t be a software engineer. It’s really not that hard to manage.

LordKeren 2y ago
I think the key word is “needless” in terms of complexity. There are a lot of k8 projects that probably could benefit from a simpler orchestration system— especially at smaller firms
- fragmede 2y ago
  do you have a simpler orchestration system you'd recommend?
  - qohen 2y ago
    Nomad, from Hashicorp, comes to mind. https://www.nomadproject.io/ https://www.nomadproject.io/ https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad
    - ahoka 2y ago
      How is it more simple?
      - Ramiro 2y ago
        Every time I read about Nomad, I wonder the same. I swear I'm not trolling here, I honestly don't get how running Nomad is simpler than Kubernetes. Especially considering that there are substantially more resources and help on Kubernetes than Nomad.
        qohen 2y ago
        Well, for starters, you don't have to have your apps containerized to work with Nomad (though it can handle containers as well as executables). But for some deeper details, I'd suggest checking out the comments in this reddit thread[0] (as well as some of the linked articles therein). E.g. From a comment by /u/Golden_Age_Fallacy: A great use of Nomad is on reduce the burden of on-boarding a team(s) of developers who are unfamiliar with cloud native deployments / systems(even containers!). Nomad jobspecs are very simple and straight forward, as compared to the complexity and pure option overload you get in k8s and helm. From /u/neutralized: It's much easier to use than k8s. Easy to setup, easy to manage, much more shallow learning curve. Nothing super fancy. Just works. I migrated a startup I was at off of a self-managed k8s setup to Nomad a few years ago and they've never looked back. From /u/esity: My team is currently building out a fully automated nomad cluster service offering internally(fortune 10) It's super awesome. Easy. Little headache. Integrates with consul and vault. We are literally planning to replace thousands of vms for K8s with nomad. Containers are faster, more resilient and writing hcl is actually fun once you learn it Now, there is a rather more lengthy comment, by /u/thomasbuchinger, that goes through the pros and cons he experienced in trying Nomad out and his conclusion is that, while he wouldn't discourage anyone from using it, "k3s and a few well-known simple projects give you 80% of Nomands [sic] features. Are as easy to operate, afford you more options in the future and have a ton of documentation/tutorials...available." There are more comments in the thread and again links to a bunch of blogposts/articles/etc., including one from fly.io that seemed pretty detailed, discussing the Googly origins of both k8s and Nomad (fly.io used Nomad but found that it wasn't the best fit for them, which is also discussed in their post -- actually, I'm going to put the link to their post below[1], since I think it is worthwhile). Hope all this helps. [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/11nsxo3/opinions_on_hashicorp_nomad https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/11nsxo3/opinions_on... [1] https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchestrator/ https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...

methodical 2y ago

Fair point but I think the key point here is unnecessary complexity versus necessary complexity. Are zero-downtime deployments and load balancing unnecessary? Perhaps for a personal project, but for any company with a consistent userbase I'd argue these are a non-negotiable, or should be anyways. In a situation where this is the expectation, k8s seems like the simplest answer, or near enough to it.

iTokio 2y ago
They are many ways to do deployments without downtime and load balancing is easy to configure without k8s.

darby_nine 2y ago

> It's some kind of a "Temporarily embarrassed FAANG engineer" situation. FAANG engineers made the same mistake, too, even though the analogy implies comparative competency or value.