5 ms·

At its heart, Kubernetes is a workload scheduler, and a fairly opinionated one at that. IMO, it's too complicated for folks that just need an "extensible platf

At its heart, Kubernetes is a workload scheduler, and a fairly opinionated one at that. IMO, it's too complicated for folks that just need an "extensible platform" when all they really need is a dumb scheduler API without all the Kubernetes bells and whistles that have been bolted on over the years. Kubernetes tries to be everything to everyone and makes the entire thing too complicated. Seeing Kubernetes broken up into smaller, more purpose built components and let folks pick and choose or swap could be helpful, at the risk of it becoming OpenStack. There's an alternate reality where Fleet is the defacto scheduler and cats and dogs live together in harmony.

mrgaro 2y ago
I'd say the opposite instead: we need Kubernetes distributions, just like Linux needs distributions. Nobody wants to build their kernel from scratch and to hand pick various user space programs. Same for Kubernetes: Distributions which pack everything you need in an opinionated way, so that it's easy to use. Now it's kinda build-your-own-kubernetes at every platform: kubeadm, EKS etc all require you to install various add-on components before you have a fully suitable cluster.
- p-o 2y ago
  I think the Operator pattern will grow to become exactly what you describe. We're still at the early stage of that, but I can see that a group of operators could become a "distribution", in your example.
- jen20 2y ago
  There have been distributions of Kubernetes for almost as long as there has been Kubernetes.
koito17 2y ago
> At its heart, Kubernetes is a workload scheduler Wouldn't it be more accurate to state Kubernetes at its core is a distributed control plane? You want something that inspects the state of a distributed system and mutates it as necessary to reach some "desired state". That's the control plane bit. For fault tolerance, the control plane itself needs to be distributed. This is the exact reason for Kubernetes' existence.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
It's a judgement call to say kube is at its heart workload scheduling, and I don't think it's true. For a while some of the managers were packaged together into some core, but that's no longer true. Yes it still resembles most people's use case too. But neither of these technical truths convince me that this incidental happenstance is a core truth. I haven't heard any arguments for why you think it's "too complicated" to be an extensible platform, and I struggle to imagine what you would rest those arguments upon. There's a restful API server and folks watch the api-server with operators and write code to make sure the real world resembles that desired state, best as they can. There's so many hundreds of operators, and it seems not-hard for many. So, like, what's so scary about that? But you insist on calling it "a dumb scheduler API" which again is using bad definitions to argue a bad point that you can't make in good faith recognition of what's actually at stake here, that contorts the view to a dumber simpler wrong view of what's happening. > Seeing Kubernetes broken up into smaller, more purpose built components and let folks pick and choose or swap could be helpful This is the exact opposite of what most people ask for, which are integrated kube distros. And they ask for that because kube is a collection of different isolated pieces that happen to compound into something bigger. You already have your wish, you just don't see it.

mrgaro 2y ago

I'd say the opposite instead: we need Kubernetes distributions, just like Linux needs distributions. Nobody wants to build their kernel from scratch and to hand pick various user space programs. Same for Kubernetes: Distributions which pack everything you need in an opinionated way, so that it's easy to use. Now it's kinda build-your-own-kubernetes at every platform: kubeadm, EKS etc all require you to install various add-on components before you have a fully suitable cluster.

p-o 2y ago
I think the Operator pattern will grow to become exactly what you describe. We're still at the early stage of that, but I can see that a group of operators could become a "distribution", in your example.
jen20 2y ago
There have been distributions of Kubernetes for almost as long as there has been Kubernetes.

koito17 2y ago

> At its heart, Kubernetes is a workload scheduler Wouldn't it be more accurate to state Kubernetes at its core is a distributed control plane? You want something that inspects the state of a distributed system and mutates it as necessary to reach some "desired state". That's the control plane bit. For fault tolerance, the control plane itself needs to be distributed. This is the exact reason for Kubernetes' existence.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

It's a judgement call to say kube is at its heart workload scheduling, and I don't think it's true. For a while some of the managers were packaged together into some core, but that's no longer true. Yes it still resembles most people's use case too. But neither of these technical truths convince me that this incidental happenstance is a core truth. I haven't heard any arguments for why you think it's "too complicated" to be an extensible platform, and I struggle to imagine what you would rest those arguments upon. There's a restful API server and folks watch the api-server with operators and write code to make sure the real world resembles that desired state, best as they can. There's so many hundreds of operators, and it seems not-hard for many. So, like, what's so scary about that? But you insist on calling it "a dumb scheduler API" which again is using bad definitions to argue a bad point that you can't make in good faith recognition of what's actually at stake here, that contorts the view to a dumber simpler wrong view of what's happening. > Seeing Kubernetes broken up into smaller, more purpose built components and let folks pick and choose or swap could be helpful This is the exact opposite of what most people ask for, which are integrated kube distros. And they ask for that because kube is a collection of different isolated pieces that happen to compound into something bigger. You already have your wish, you just don't see it.