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Every item on that list is "boring" tech. Approximately everyone have used load balancers, test environments and monitoring since the 90s just fine. What is it

Every item on that list is "boring" tech. Approximately everyone have used load balancers, test environments and monitoring since the 90s just fine. What is it that you think make Kubernetes especially suited for this compared to every other solution during the past three decades? There are good reasons to use Kubernetes, mainly if you are using public clouds and want to avoid lock-in. I may be partial, since managing it pays my bills. But it is complex, mostly unnecessarily so, and no one should be able to say with a straight face that it achieves better uptime or requires less personnel than any alternative. That's just sales talk, and should be a big warning sign.

YZF 2y ago
It's the way things work together. If you want to add a new service you just annotate that service and DNS gets updated, your ingress gets the route added, cert-manager gets you the certs from let's encrypt. You want Prometheus to monitor your pod you just add the right annotation. When your server goes down k8s will move your pod around. k8s storage will take care of having the storage follow your pod. Your entire configuration is highly available and replicated in etcd. It's just very different than your legacy "standard" technology.
- gr3ml1n 2y ago
  None of this is difficult to do or automate, and we've done it for years. Kubernetes simply makes it more complex by adding additional abstractions in the pursuit of pretending hardware doesn't exist. There are, maybe, a dozen companies in the world with a large enough physical footprint where Kubernetes might make sense. Everyone else is either engaged in resume-driven development, or has gone down some profoundly wrong path with their application architecture to where it is somehow the lesser evil.
  - sampullman 2y ago
    I used to feel the same way, but have come around. I think it's great for small companies for a few reasons. I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned. I basically don't have to think about ops anymore until something exotic comes up, it's nice. I agree that it feels clunky, and it was annoying to learn, but once you have something working it's a huge time saver. The ability to scale without drastically changing the system is a bonus.
    - gr3ml1n 2y ago
      > I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned. I can do the same thing with `make local` invoking a few bash commands. If the complexity increases beyond that, a mistake has been made.
    - xorcist 2y ago
      You could say the same thing about Ansible or Vagrant or Nomad or Salt or anything else. I can say with complete confidence however, that if you are running Kubernetes and not thinking about ops, you are simply not operating it yourself. You are paying someone else to think about it for you. Which is fine, but says nothing about the technology.
      - sampullman 2y ago
        You always have to think about ops, regardless of tooling. I agree that you can have a very nice, reproducible setup with any of those tools though. Personally, I haven't found those alternatives to be significantly easier to use (though I don't have experience with Salt). For me personally, self hosted k3s on Hetzner with FluxCD is the least painful option I've found.
    - papichulo2023 2y ago
      Managed k8s is great if you already in the cloud, selfhosting it as a small company is waste of money.
      - sampullman 2y ago
        I've found self hosted k3s to be about the same effort as EKS for my workloads, and maybe 20-30% of the cost for similar capability.
threeseed 2y ago
Kubernetes is boring tech as well. And the advantage of it is one way to manage resources, scaling, logging, observability, hardware etc. All of which is stored in Git and so audited, reviewed, versioned, tested etc in exactly the same way.
lmm 2y ago
> Every item on that list is "boring" tech. Approximately everyone have used load balancers, test environments and monitoring since the 90s just fine. What is it that you think make Kubernetes especially suited for this compared to every other solution during the past three decades? You could make the same argument against using cloud at all, or against using CI. The point of Kubernetes isn't to make those things possible, it's to make them easy and consistent.
- drw85 2y ago
  But none of those things are easy. All cloud environments are fairly complex and kubernetes is not something that you just do in an afternoon. You need to learn about how it works, which takes about the same time as using 'simpler' means to do things directly. Sure, it means that two people that already understand k8s can easily exchange or handover a project, which might be harder to understand if done with other means. But that's about the only bonus it brings in most situations.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > All cloud environments are fairly complex and kubernetes is not something that you just do in an afternoon. You need to learn about how it works, which takes about the same time as using 'simpler' means to do things directly. The first time you do it, sure, like any other tool. But once you're comfortable with it and have a working setup, you can bash out "one more service deployment" in a few minutes. That's the key capability.
  - Gee101 2y ago
    The other bonus is most opensource software support a Kubernetes deployment. This means I can find software and have it deployed pretty quickly.
- eadmund 2y ago
  > The point of Kubernetes isn't to make those things possible, it's to make them easy and consistent. Kubernetes definitely makes things consistent, but I do not think that it makes them easy. There’s certainly a lot to learn from Kubernetes, but I strongly believe that a more tasteful successor is possible, and I hope that it is inevitable.
_w1tm 2y ago
> But it is complex, mostly unnecessarily so Unnecessary complexity sounds like something that should be fixed. Can you give an example?

YZF 2y ago

It's the way things work together. If you want to add a new service you just annotate that service and DNS gets updated, your ingress gets the route added, cert-manager gets you the certs from let's encrypt. You want Prometheus to monitor your pod you just add the right annotation. When your server goes down k8s will move your pod around. k8s storage will take care of having the storage follow your pod. Your entire configuration is highly available and replicated in etcd. It's just very different than your legacy "standard" technology.

gr3ml1n 2y ago
None of this is difficult to do or automate, and we've done it for years. Kubernetes simply makes it more complex by adding additional abstractions in the pursuit of pretending hardware doesn't exist. There are, maybe, a dozen companies in the world with a large enough physical footprint where Kubernetes might make sense. Everyone else is either engaged in resume-driven development, or has gone down some profoundly wrong path with their application architecture to where it is somehow the lesser evil.
- sampullman 2y ago
  I used to feel the same way, but have come around. I think it's great for small companies for a few reasons. I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned. I basically don't have to think about ops anymore until something exotic comes up, it's nice. I agree that it feels clunky, and it was annoying to learn, but once you have something working it's a huge time saver. The ability to scale without drastically changing the system is a bonus.
  - gr3ml1n 2y ago
    > I can spin up effectively identical dev/ci/stg/prod clusters for a new project in an hour for a medium sized project, with CD in addition to everything GP mentioned. I can do the same thing with `make local` invoking a few bash commands. If the complexity increases beyond that, a mistake has been made.
  - xorcist 2y ago
    You could say the same thing about Ansible or Vagrant or Nomad or Salt or anything else. I can say with complete confidence however, that if you are running Kubernetes and not thinking about ops, you are simply not operating it yourself. You are paying someone else to think about it for you. Which is fine, but says nothing about the technology.
    - sampullman 2y ago
      You always have to think about ops, regardless of tooling. I agree that you can have a very nice, reproducible setup with any of those tools though. Personally, I haven't found those alternatives to be significantly easier to use (though I don't have experience with Salt). For me personally, self hosted k3s on Hetzner with FluxCD is the least painful option I've found.
  - papichulo2023 2y ago
    Managed k8s is great if you already in the cloud, selfhosting it as a small company is waste of money.
    - sampullman 2y ago
      I've found self hosted k3s to be about the same effort as EKS for my workloads, and maybe 20-30% of the cost for similar capability.

threeseed 2y ago

Kubernetes is boring tech as well. And the advantage of it is one way to manage resources, scaling, logging, observability, hardware etc. All of which is stored in Git and so audited, reviewed, versioned, tested etc in exactly the same way.

lmm 2y ago

> Every item on that list is "boring" tech. Approximately everyone have used load balancers, test environments and monitoring since the 90s just fine. What is it that you think make Kubernetes especially suited for this compared to every other solution during the past three decades? You could make the same argument against using cloud at all, or against using CI. The point of Kubernetes isn't to make those things possible, it's to make them easy and consistent.

drw85 2y ago
But none of those things are easy. All cloud environments are fairly complex and kubernetes is not something that you just do in an afternoon. You need to learn about how it works, which takes about the same time as using 'simpler' means to do things directly. Sure, it means that two people that already understand k8s can easily exchange or handover a project, which might be harder to understand if done with other means. But that's about the only bonus it brings in most situations.
- lmm 2y ago
  > All cloud environments are fairly complex and kubernetes is not something that you just do in an afternoon. You need to learn about how it works, which takes about the same time as using 'simpler' means to do things directly. The first time you do it, sure, like any other tool. But once you're comfortable with it and have a working setup, you can bash out "one more service deployment" in a few minutes. That's the key capability.
- Gee101 2y ago
  The other bonus is most opensource software support a Kubernetes deployment. This means I can find software and have it deployed pretty quickly.
eadmund 2y ago
> The point of Kubernetes isn't to make those things possible, it's to make them easy and consistent. Kubernetes definitely makes things consistent, but I do not think that it makes them easy. There’s certainly a lot to learn from Kubernetes, but I strongly believe that a more tasteful successor is possible, and I hope that it is inevitable.

_w1tm 2y ago

> But it is complex, mostly unnecessarily so Unnecessary complexity sounds like something that should be fixed. Can you give an example?