5 ms·

Zero-Downtime Deployments with Docker Compose – No Kubernetes Required

90 points by canto 3mo ago

dewey 3mo ago
What's the thought behind having white and light grey text on a light grey background?
- loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
  Looks like “dark mode” implementation attempt which missed setting the background to black.
  - galleywest200 3mo ago
    Its black background and white text on my screen. So either the OP saw the comments and fixed it or some people in this thread have weird settings. Or maybe I have weird settings...hmmm.
    - loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
      It’s changed since I checked. I think op fixed it.
- jacinabox 3mo ago
  There was an article a while back on HN about why web designers choose light grey on white background. Basically, it looks fine on their own monitor which has the contrast turned way up
- blakesterz 3mo ago
  The css is ".prose-invert" and there's a ".prose" that looks better, I wonder if something threw a switch to make it "invert" when it should be ".prose" because you're right, this is unreadable as-is. Interesting read though.
- sourdecor 3mo ago
  Are the people here not looking at the article or bots? How on Earth does anyone read this?
  - easton 3mo ago
    Guessing it’s reading the system color scheme, because on my phone it’s white text on black. (on iOS with dark mode enabled system wide)
    - hoherd 3mo ago
      Oh god, I just disabled dark mode and yeah, it looks awful. Looks great in dark mode though.
  - draw_down 3mo ago
    It’s white text on black bg for me. But to answer your question- reader mode!
  - teliskr 3mo ago
    I tweaked the css in my browser with developer tools.
  - Modified3019 3mo ago
    For me it’s Dark Reader (https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader) which can be installed on at least chrome and Firefox desktop browsers, and safari and Kagi on iPhones. I use it to keep from getting flashbanged by my monitor. In this case it also fixes the above site, however some websites need the color filter mode changed to work better, so realistically I’m not ending up with less fixing of websites, just easier fixing.
- chickensong 3mo ago
  Their dark mode is busted if you don't have JS enabled.
hnlmorg 3mo ago
> thousands of monitoring checks per minute That isn’t a lot. You could easily run that from one host. The reason people reach for Kubernetes (and similar) is because they need to scale past that single host dependency.
- ghusto 3mo ago
  You could, but they don't, meaning their argument is still sound (whether they _could_ use a single host is besides the point, they're not doing that).
  - hnlmorg 3mo ago
    Are you sure they’re not? They’re multi-region, but that doesn’t mean they’re running across multiple hosts in each region. Docker compose doesn’t support pooling multiple hosts, so if they are running multiple hosts per region then there’s a lot more complexity to their setup than they’re documenting in that blog. Even if that complexity is human toil managing each host as a separate entity.
- nullpoint420 3mo ago
  100%. And a shared mental model. I love how I can scale up all my services the same way, across clouds. It's great.
- chmod775 3mo ago
  The reason most people reach for Kubernetes is because it's cool. The entire infra the vast majority of Kubernetes users have could run on a single bare metal machine with a second one for redundancy. To be fair: using Kubernetes anyways builds the skill just in case you become one of the 0.1% who actually need it down the line.
  - hadlock 3mo ago
    You can hire an Azure or Google Kubernetes devops guy and he will be equally comfortable on your AWS EKS kubernetes cluster. And when he leaves, you don't have a six week onboarding process with the new guy to learn all the ins and outs of your totally bespoke, non-standard container orchestration system that was cobbled together by two devs with no operations experience. K3S takes about 5 minutes to setup the first time and you instantly have an entire universe of standardized operational tooling. I wouldn't touch docker compose with a 20 foot pole for production work.
tallytarik 3mo ago
docker-rollout also works well: https://github.com/wowu/docker-rollout https://github.com/wowu/docker-rollout The readme covers connection draining with Traefik which should solve one of the issues the author mentions
variety8675 3mo ago
> There's a mass delusion in the industry that you need Kubernetes to run a serious production service. You don't. At StatusDude, we serve thousands of monitoring checks per minute, run multi-region workers, and deploy multiple times a day This is pretty small scale, Kubernetes comes in when you've got a larger workload.
- k_roy 3mo ago
  The whole reasoning behind this is flawed. “We don’t know how to scale Traefik so we went with haproxy” Well doh. Haproxy is designed for this. You can make haproxy serve copious amount of traffic on a single arm core and a little bit of ram. Imagine what you can do with a few replicas on your large clusters. This has nothing to do with the choice of CI/CD or docker versus kubernetes.
- _def 3mo ago
  In theory. I read so many times now where people report they use it and don't really need it, and I've seen it myself now too. Still very anecdotal, but it seems somethings there
- canto 3mo ago
  While I agree with you I'm not sure the rest of the world does. Over the past decade, I'm seeing k8s used everywhere for everything, companies setting up clusters to run literally one simple app with couple of hundred requests per hour.
  - phito 3mo ago
    We do this because we need redundancy. Are there non kubernetes alternatives for HA/redundancy that are worth it?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
limaho 3mo ago
Are you monitoring resource utilization per container? Do notifications get sent out when container(s) become unhealthy? How are you handling secrets? These are things I'm trying to figure out at work using Podman. Would love to hear about any experience in these areas.
bijowo1676 3mo ago
so op just recreated with sticks and tape a very basic feature what k8s does out of the box, and nobody else would be able to support his creation, because its handrolled adhoc with sparse documentation. sounds like ghetto engineering
- dantillberg 3mo ago
  [dead]
- alexaholic 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - bijowo1676 3mo ago
    I am not sure the argument "muhh k8s is too complex, I will roll docker instead" flies well in the age of cloud managed k8s offerings EKS is literally one click of a button away and you dont need to handroll this. even if you dont know AWS console nor terraform, claude code with aws mcp can do that for you
    - switchbak 3mo ago
      I worked at a place (a big name in a given vertical!), where the SRE looked at K8S and said "hold my beer". Out came Docker, dnsmasq, miles of duct tape and a whole lot of swearing. Just to come nowhere close to reinventing something better folks were doing years prior. Just because you can (or think you can) doesn't mean you should. I sure do hope no one is maintaining that NIH monstrosity now!
    - robmccoll 3mo ago
      The problem I have with Kunernetes in general is that everything is slow and configuring everything seems needlessly complex in common use cases.
  - zzyzxd 3mo ago
    It's totally fine to not to use k8s. Personally, I think I have made several good decisions in my career to use/avoid k8s in different scenarios. But if someone wrote a blog to brag about not using k8s, they can't stop people from wanting to compare their work against k8s. If there's any arrogance in the air, it feels stronger on the other side.
dwa3592 3mo ago
>>zero-downtime the site is down for me.
kccqzy 3mo ago
This just feels like mostly a complaint of missing features in Traefik.
maxboone 3mo ago
Mandatory mention: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubernetes/ https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern... But yeah, pretty cool DNS resolving features in HAProxy, that's nifty
- manmal 3mo ago
  I‘ve built this anti-k8s stance pre-LLMs, and just realized that, actually, agents should be pretty helpful in dealing with it? Is avoiding kubernetes still advisable for projects that will likely never use its full complexity, given how easy it is to maintain now?
  - jaggederest 3mo ago
    Kube and helm are ideal for LLM usage, they make what is a fragile kind of thing into declarative, same as terraform for infra at the slightly lower level.
teliskr 3mo ago
There's a mass delusion in the industry that using Kubernetes has to be hard, grossly over complex, and is always wrong if you are not Netflix scale. Is the system as described by the author significantly less complex and better than a small Kubernetes system? Sounds like they went through a lot of work to get it to their desired state. Rolling your own zero-downtime deployments is as about as a good idea as rolling your own security... it's not a good idea. I run our small system on a single EC2 instance with K3s. It runs a half-dozen or so services and does it quite well. I don't think it is particularly complex or over engineered. I like how easy it is to maintain the configuration in a helm package and quickly deploy it in different environments. There is a learning curve for doing K8s well, but that's true for any non-trivial system.
citizenpaul 3mo ago
>P.S Nginx would do too, I just felt like getting haproxy up this time :) I think this line summarizes better than anything. Perfect example of how move fast and break things begins gloriously at first then inevitably, the breaking you thought you were doing hasn't even started and you find out what that part means. I've always been the one saying "this is going to be a problem in a couple months" then I get shot down for "being negative." Then in a couple of of months when it fails I start getting aggression thrown at me "oh i know you want to say I told you so" and such even though I've never said such a thing when something fails. No. I would just like you to hear out my thoughts even when they may not be what you want to hear. We are all working towards the same goal.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
brumar 3mo ago
I remember a time where HN was quite critical to the complexity of k8s. After reading top comments, I can see the tide has shifted.
- canto 3mo ago
  This or there's a lot of fresh blood ;-)
  - hnlmorg 3mo ago
    I’m one of those top commenters who used to be a K8 naysayer. I’m also definitely not young blood. The reason my position has changed is because: 1. The tooling has gotten better for setting up and managing K8. 2. In two of the last 3 jobs where we opted for a simplified alternative to k8, we came to regret that decision within a couple of years of that decision being made. If you’re core architecture is changing on a timescale of months (not years) then you picked the wrong foundations to build from. That all said, I still think there is a pragmatic decision that needs to be made. And if I were in the author of this articles position I probably wouldn’t have picked k8s for this task either, despite what I said above. But, and as I said in my comment dismissing this article, they are dealing with low traffic and none of the problems that lend themselves to the benefits of k8. So my criticism of this article is that it’s misleading because their problem is easy but they’re writing as if they’re having to deal With problems of scale when they’re actually not.
- bizzletk 3mo ago
  CTOs have found reasons to standardize on k8s and it's not just for technical reasons. This was recently discussed last week: https://notnotp.com/notes/what-job-interviews-taught-me-about-kubernetes/ https://notnotp.com/notes/what-job-interviews-taught-me-abou... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546428
- zug_zug 3mo ago
  I used to be critical of almost everyone who used it. Now that I've been learning the ecosystem for a couple years, I'm not as angry about it, and it doesn't affect me as much personally. I still think almost all of my complaints were valid: - not just container orchestration, more like a whole AWS solution (its own routing) - has single-points of failure that would be avoided if you just used aws - unnecessary complexity for almost all use cases - ecosystem easily allows you to 2x-8x that complexity (helm+argocd+istio+carpenter+dozens more=hundreds of new failure modes) - fundamentally moves many teams to a "I don't understand why my service is crashing, so let's just bring up more nodes every time rather than ever learning to debug it" mentality. - All the feature teams that are supposed to "own their own kubernetes implementation for their own services" never do. Of course a lot of that frustration is more at working at a place with a poorly-operated SOA where it takes a half-dozen services to send an email to a client or send a text or something silly. It sure is a waste of runway to obsess over a SOA when you aren't profitable yet. But at this point it's sort of a sunk cost because it's become the industry standard. And AI can help with 90% of the complexity, which is it's own yellow-flag, but here we are.
Jumziey 3mo ago
It's actually fun to see this. Running systems in a lot of different ways are just interesting. I do however get kinda sad at the hate at k8s because it's really good at what it does. I've seen so many projects bending over backwards to avoid k8s and pay large cloud bills to avoid it at all costs. (ECS and app services are hopelessly expensive and bothersome) K8s is really good, pretty easy to maintain, but a bit hard to understand. Mostly because distributed, zero down time systems are a bit hard to get by nature. But if you have someone that wants to take it on I've managed k8s clusters, solo, without incident, while doing lots of other stuff too (working with larger teams now though). Not to mention there's a lot of competence out there that can take over if I'd move on. Most of the deep complexity comes with more advance use cases, that wont show up for smaller deployments. That said, no h8 towards going your own way! If your a solo developer (or small team) for a smallish project, don't feel the absolute need. If you get to the point you need it you should be earning enough to start paying someone to help ya get your app to a distributed system like k8s. I think it's good to invest the time in understanding k8s though as a professional. Even if you won't directly run it it teaches you a lot about how to think about distributed, zero downtime systems. And what requirements that puts on an app.
- 000ooo000 3mo ago
  Balanced takes like this are the only reason I still come back to HN. A shot at K3S in my homelab is in my backlog but young kids have set me back. If you have any material that touches on what you said above I'd appreciate a link. So much crap out there which is just Hello World blogspam.
  - AviationAtom 3mo ago
    KodeKloud is worth a subscription. I'm an older learner too and their courseware works well for me.
- soco 3mo ago
  I see stuff like Azure Container Applications like an easy introduction to the world of k8s. Sane defaults, looks managed but you can still get familiar with all the important concepts, and sooner or later you can move to a proper Kubernetes setup while having mastered the ideas behind it. If needed, of course.
JohnMakin 3mo ago
It's exhausting reading about this stuff because there is inevitably a barrage of comments about "you don't need kubernetes, you can run your app out of a single vm you dumb trend chaser" in this style. Like, sorry, no, not to a point. Yes, if you have a small app without a lot of scale, and it doesn't need to be uber reliable and have very little if almost 0 downtime, okay, sure. Most use cases are like that! This is correct but applying it as a generality is just plain wrong and displays the type of arrogance people accuse kubernetes users of having. What happens if a container in the VM goes down or the app inside of it crashes, how do you recover? Now you need some self-recovery mechanism via systemD or whatever, which will grow in complexity and fickleness over time. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens when you need to upgrade/restart your VM? Ok, make a standby VM as backup that will mostly sit idle, or require a full-app redeploy any time you need to do anything to the first VM. Now you need to design a blue/green mechanism between them, and probably some networking layer work. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens, if running in cloud, you have a regional outage or degradation? Stand up another VM in another region and manage the networking layer between them. Or, if running locally, your ISP has an outage because of a backhoe or something. Ok, we'll rent rack space in another data center as backup. Own all the mechanisms between cutting between those two now. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens if your app gets huge volume during peak times, and very little volume during non-peak, and you find yourself overprovisioning to the point your CFO/CTO freaks out about the bill? Well, we'll make our own dynamic scaling mechanism. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens when your app traffic gets so large you start running into OS limitations, like file descriptor limits? Start trying some of the aforementioned solutions. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens if you need service discovery, monitoring, or ensure network isolation between various services? Different VM's + your own hacked together service mesh, or wire something in the VM. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens when you need to guarantee secret isolation between containers? Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. Let's say you don't actually need any of this or think you never will. Fine! That's valid. But what you don't want, is to suddenly hit some scale and any of these things (I could list way more but I feel I am belaboring the point), migrating off these setups can become a year+ project, if not way longer. I know because I have had to do this twice now. I cannot possibly overstate how painful it is. So, people usually just go with kubernetes because 1) it is operationally not that hard to deal with compared to the things I just mentioned, and has a massive ecosystem and 2) the risk of the VM + container spiraling into complexity is perceived as way more than going more complex at the start.
amluto 3mo ago
I was surprised that there was no mention of two things: 1. Retrying a non-idempotent request on a failure type that does indicate that no action was taken is not necessarily safe. 2. It’s possible and actually fairly common to design a backend that can do a clean shutdown: it stops accepting new requests, completes old requests, then exits. I sincerely hope that Docker’s tooling is good enough for a service to unregister itself before it actually stops accepting requests, but I’m not actually very familiar with using Docker to manage HTTP routing. (I use a home grown tool that is far simpler.)
huangchengsir 3mo ago
[flagged]
marvinstrauch 3mo ago
[flagged]
aliyome 3mo ago
Isn't that exactly what kamal-proxy is for?

90 points by canto 3mo ago

dewey 3mo ago

What's the thought behind having white and light grey text on a light grey background?

loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
Looks like “dark mode” implementation attempt which missed setting the background to black.
- galleywest200 3mo ago
  Its black background and white text on my screen. So either the OP saw the comments and fixed it or some people in this thread have weird settings. Or maybe I have weird settings...hmmm.
  - loloquwowndueo 3mo ago
    It’s changed since I checked. I think op fixed it.
jacinabox 3mo ago
There was an article a while back on HN about why web designers choose light grey on white background. Basically, it looks fine on their own monitor which has the contrast turned way up
blakesterz 3mo ago
The css is ".prose-invert" and there's a ".prose" that looks better, I wonder if something threw a switch to make it "invert" when it should be ".prose" because you're right, this is unreadable as-is. Interesting read though.
sourdecor 3mo ago
Are the people here not looking at the article or bots? How on Earth does anyone read this?
- easton 3mo ago
  Guessing it’s reading the system color scheme, because on my phone it’s white text on black. (on iOS with dark mode enabled system wide)
  - hoherd 3mo ago
    Oh god, I just disabled dark mode and yeah, it looks awful. Looks great in dark mode though.
- draw_down 3mo ago
  It’s white text on black bg for me. But to answer your question- reader mode!
- teliskr 3mo ago
  I tweaked the css in my browser with developer tools.
- Modified3019 3mo ago
  For me it’s Dark Reader (https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader) which can be installed on at least chrome and Firefox desktop browsers, and safari and Kagi on iPhones. I use it to keep from getting flashbanged by my monitor. In this case it also fixes the above site, however some websites need the color filter mode changed to work better, so realistically I’m not ending up with less fixing of websites, just easier fixing.
chickensong 3mo ago
Their dark mode is busted if you don't have JS enabled.

hnlmorg 3mo ago

> thousands of monitoring checks per minute That isn’t a lot. You could easily run that from one host. The reason people reach for Kubernetes (and similar) is because they need to scale past that single host dependency.

ghusto 3mo ago
You could, but they don't, meaning their argument is still sound (whether they _could_ use a single host is besides the point, they're not doing that).
- hnlmorg 3mo ago
  Are you sure they’re not? They’re multi-region, but that doesn’t mean they’re running across multiple hosts in each region. Docker compose doesn’t support pooling multiple hosts, so if they are running multiple hosts per region then there’s a lot more complexity to their setup than they’re documenting in that blog. Even if that complexity is human toil managing each host as a separate entity.
nullpoint420 3mo ago
100%. And a shared mental model. I love how I can scale up all my services the same way, across clouds. It's great.
chmod775 3mo ago
The reason most people reach for Kubernetes is because it's cool. The entire infra the vast majority of Kubernetes users have could run on a single bare metal machine with a second one for redundancy. To be fair: using Kubernetes anyways builds the skill just in case you become one of the 0.1% who actually need it down the line.
- hadlock 3mo ago
  You can hire an Azure or Google Kubernetes devops guy and he will be equally comfortable on your AWS EKS kubernetes cluster. And when he leaves, you don't have a six week onboarding process with the new guy to learn all the ins and outs of your totally bespoke, non-standard container orchestration system that was cobbled together by two devs with no operations experience. K3S takes about 5 minutes to setup the first time and you instantly have an entire universe of standardized operational tooling. I wouldn't touch docker compose with a 20 foot pole for production work.

tallytarik 3mo ago

docker-rollout also works well: https://github.com/wowu/docker-rollout https://github.com/wowu/docker-rollout The readme covers connection draining with Traefik which should solve one of the issues the author mentions

variety8675 3mo ago

> There's a mass delusion in the industry that you need Kubernetes to run a serious production service. You don't. At StatusDude, we serve thousands of monitoring checks per minute, run multi-region workers, and deploy multiple times a day This is pretty small scale, Kubernetes comes in when you've got a larger workload.

k_roy 3mo ago
The whole reasoning behind this is flawed. “We don’t know how to scale Traefik so we went with haproxy” Well doh. Haproxy is designed for this. You can make haproxy serve copious amount of traffic on a single arm core and a little bit of ram. Imagine what you can do with a few replicas on your large clusters. This has nothing to do with the choice of CI/CD or docker versus kubernetes.
_def 3mo ago
In theory. I read so many times now where people report they use it and don't really need it, and I've seen it myself now too. Still very anecdotal, but it seems somethings there
canto 3mo ago
While I agree with you I'm not sure the rest of the world does. Over the past decade, I'm seeing k8s used everywhere for everything, companies setting up clusters to run literally one simple app with couple of hundred requests per hour.
- phito 3mo ago
  We do this because we need redundancy. Are there non kubernetes alternatives for HA/redundancy that are worth it?

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

limaho 3mo ago

Are you monitoring resource utilization per container? Do notifications get sent out when container(s) become unhealthy? How are you handling secrets? These are things I'm trying to figure out at work using Podman. Would love to hear about any experience in these areas.

bijowo1676 3mo ago

so op just recreated with sticks and tape a very basic feature what k8s does out of the box, and nobody else would be able to support his creation, because its handrolled adhoc with sparse documentation. sounds like ghetto engineering

dantillberg 3mo ago
[dead]
alexaholic 3mo ago
[flagged]
- bijowo1676 3mo ago
  I am not sure the argument "muhh k8s is too complex, I will roll docker instead" flies well in the age of cloud managed k8s offerings EKS is literally one click of a button away and you dont need to handroll this. even if you dont know AWS console nor terraform, claude code with aws mcp can do that for you
  - switchbak 3mo ago
    I worked at a place (a big name in a given vertical!), where the SRE looked at K8S and said "hold my beer". Out came Docker, dnsmasq, miles of duct tape and a whole lot of swearing. Just to come nowhere close to reinventing something better folks were doing years prior. Just because you can (or think you can) doesn't mean you should. I sure do hope no one is maintaining that NIH monstrosity now!
  - robmccoll 3mo ago
    The problem I have with Kunernetes in general is that everything is slow and configuring everything seems needlessly complex in common use cases.
- zzyzxd 3mo ago
  It's totally fine to not to use k8s. Personally, I think I have made several good decisions in my career to use/avoid k8s in different scenarios. But if someone wrote a blog to brag about not using k8s, they can't stop people from wanting to compare their work against k8s. If there's any arrogance in the air, it feels stronger on the other side.

dwa3592 3mo ago

>>zero-downtime the site is down for me.

kccqzy 3mo ago

This just feels like mostly a complaint of missing features in Traefik.

maxboone 3mo ago

Mandatory mention: https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubernetes/ https://www.macchaffee.com/blog/2024/you-have-built-a-kubern... But yeah, pretty cool DNS resolving features in HAProxy, that's nifty

manmal 3mo ago
I‘ve built this anti-k8s stance pre-LLMs, and just realized that, actually, agents should be pretty helpful in dealing with it? Is avoiding kubernetes still advisable for projects that will likely never use its full complexity, given how easy it is to maintain now?
- jaggederest 3mo ago
  Kube and helm are ideal for LLM usage, they make what is a fragile kind of thing into declarative, same as terraform for infra at the slightly lower level.

teliskr 3mo ago

There's a mass delusion in the industry that using Kubernetes has to be hard, grossly over complex, and is always wrong if you are not Netflix scale. Is the system as described by the author significantly less complex and better than a small Kubernetes system? Sounds like they went through a lot of work to get it to their desired state. Rolling your own zero-downtime deployments is as about as a good idea as rolling your own security... it's not a good idea. I run our small system on a single EC2 instance with K3s. It runs a half-dozen or so services and does it quite well. I don't think it is particularly complex or over engineered. I like how easy it is to maintain the configuration in a helm package and quickly deploy it in different environments. There is a learning curve for doing K8s well, but that's true for any non-trivial system.

citizenpaul 3mo ago

>P.S Nginx would do too, I just felt like getting haproxy up this time :) I think this line summarizes better than anything. Perfect example of how move fast and break things begins gloriously at first then inevitably, the breaking you thought you were doing hasn't even started and you find out what that part means. I've always been the one saying "this is going to be a problem in a couple months" then I get shot down for "being negative." Then in a couple of of months when it fails I start getting aggression thrown at me "oh i know you want to say I told you so" and such even though I've never said such a thing when something fails. No. I would just like you to hear out my thoughts even when they may not be what you want to hear. We are all working towards the same goal.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

brumar 3mo ago

I remember a time where HN was quite critical to the complexity of k8s. After reading top comments, I can see the tide has shifted.

canto 3mo ago
This or there's a lot of fresh blood ;-)
- hnlmorg 3mo ago
  I’m one of those top commenters who used to be a K8 naysayer. I’m also definitely not young blood. The reason my position has changed is because: 1. The tooling has gotten better for setting up and managing K8. 2. In two of the last 3 jobs where we opted for a simplified alternative to k8, we came to regret that decision within a couple of years of that decision being made. If you’re core architecture is changing on a timescale of months (not years) then you picked the wrong foundations to build from. That all said, I still think there is a pragmatic decision that needs to be made. And if I were in the author of this articles position I probably wouldn’t have picked k8s for this task either, despite what I said above. But, and as I said in my comment dismissing this article, they are dealing with low traffic and none of the problems that lend themselves to the benefits of k8. So my criticism of this article is that it’s misleading because their problem is easy but they’re writing as if they’re having to deal With problems of scale when they’re actually not.
bizzletk 3mo ago
CTOs have found reasons to standardize on k8s and it's not just for technical reasons. This was recently discussed last week: https://notnotp.com/notes/what-job-interviews-taught-me-about-kubernetes/ https://notnotp.com/notes/what-job-interviews-taught-me-abou... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546428
zug_zug 3mo ago
I used to be critical of almost everyone who used it. Now that I've been learning the ecosystem for a couple years, I'm not as angry about it, and it doesn't affect me as much personally. I still think almost all of my complaints were valid: - not just container orchestration, more like a whole AWS solution (its own routing) - has single-points of failure that would be avoided if you just used aws - unnecessary complexity for almost all use cases - ecosystem easily allows you to 2x-8x that complexity (helm+argocd+istio+carpenter+dozens more=hundreds of new failure modes) - fundamentally moves many teams to a "I don't understand why my service is crashing, so let's just bring up more nodes every time rather than ever learning to debug it" mentality. - All the feature teams that are supposed to "own their own kubernetes implementation for their own services" never do. Of course a lot of that frustration is more at working at a place with a poorly-operated SOA where it takes a half-dozen services to send an email to a client or send a text or something silly. It sure is a waste of runway to obsess over a SOA when you aren't profitable yet. But at this point it's sort of a sunk cost because it's become the industry standard. And AI can help with 90% of the complexity, which is it's own yellow-flag, but here we are.

Jumziey 3mo ago

It's actually fun to see this. Running systems in a lot of different ways are just interesting. I do however get kinda sad at the hate at k8s because it's really good at what it does. I've seen so many projects bending over backwards to avoid k8s and pay large cloud bills to avoid it at all costs. (ECS and app services are hopelessly expensive and bothersome) K8s is really good, pretty easy to maintain, but a bit hard to understand. Mostly because distributed, zero down time systems are a bit hard to get by nature. But if you have someone that wants to take it on I've managed k8s clusters, solo, without incident, while doing lots of other stuff too (working with larger teams now though). Not to mention there's a lot of competence out there that can take over if I'd move on. Most of the deep complexity comes with more advance use cases, that wont show up for smaller deployments. That said, no h8 towards going your own way! If your a solo developer (or small team) for a smallish project, don't feel the absolute need. If you get to the point you need it you should be earning enough to start paying someone to help ya get your app to a distributed system like k8s. I think it's good to invest the time in understanding k8s though as a professional. Even if you won't directly run it it teaches you a lot about how to think about distributed, zero downtime systems. And what requirements that puts on an app.

000ooo000 3mo ago
Balanced takes like this are the only reason I still come back to HN. A shot at K3S in my homelab is in my backlog but young kids have set me back. If you have any material that touches on what you said above I'd appreciate a link. So much crap out there which is just Hello World blogspam.
- AviationAtom 3mo ago
  KodeKloud is worth a subscription. I'm an older learner too and their courseware works well for me.
soco 3mo ago
I see stuff like Azure Container Applications like an easy introduction to the world of k8s. Sane defaults, looks managed but you can still get familiar with all the important concepts, and sooner or later you can move to a proper Kubernetes setup while having mastered the ideas behind it. If needed, of course.

JohnMakin 3mo ago

It's exhausting reading about this stuff because there is inevitably a barrage of comments about "you don't need kubernetes, you can run your app out of a single vm you dumb trend chaser" in this style. Like, sorry, no, not to a point. Yes, if you have a small app without a lot of scale, and it doesn't need to be uber reliable and have very little if almost 0 downtime, okay, sure. Most use cases are like that! This is correct but applying it as a generality is just plain wrong and displays the type of arrogance people accuse kubernetes users of having. What happens if a container in the VM goes down or the app inside of it crashes, how do you recover? Now you need some self-recovery mechanism via systemD or whatever, which will grow in complexity and fickleness over time. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens when you need to upgrade/restart your VM? Ok, make a standby VM as backup that will mostly sit idle, or require a full-app redeploy any time you need to do anything to the first VM. Now you need to design a blue/green mechanism between them, and probably some networking layer work. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens, if running in cloud, you have a regional outage or degradation? Stand up another VM in another region and manage the networking layer between them. Or, if running locally, your ISP has an outage because of a backhoe or something. Ok, we'll rent rack space in another data center as backup. Own all the mechanisms between cutting between those two now. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens if your app gets huge volume during peak times, and very little volume during non-peak, and you find yourself overprovisioning to the point your CFO/CTO freaks out about the bill? Well, we'll make our own dynamic scaling mechanism. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens when your app traffic gets so large you start running into OS limitations, like file descriptor limits? Start trying some of the aforementioned solutions. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens if you need service discovery, monitoring, or ensure network isolation between various services? Different VM's + your own hacked together service mesh, or wire something in the VM. Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. What happens when you need to guarantee secret isolation between containers? Congrats, you are now doing your own version of kubernetes. Let's say you don't actually need any of this or think you never will. Fine! That's valid. But what you don't want, is to suddenly hit some scale and any of these things (I could list way more but I feel I am belaboring the point), migrating off these setups can become a year+ project, if not way longer. I know because I have had to do this twice now. I cannot possibly overstate how painful it is. So, people usually just go with kubernetes because 1) it is operationally not that hard to deal with compared to the things I just mentioned, and has a massive ecosystem and 2) the risk of the VM + container spiraling into complexity is perceived as way more than going more complex at the start.

amluto 3mo ago

I was surprised that there was no mention of two things: 1. Retrying a non-idempotent request on a failure type that does indicate that no action was taken is not necessarily safe. 2. It’s possible and actually fairly common to design a backend that can do a clean shutdown: it stops accepting new requests, completes old requests, then exits. I sincerely hope that Docker’s tooling is good enough for a service to unregister itself before it actually stops accepting requests, but I’m not actually very familiar with using Docker to manage HTTP routing. (I use a home grown tool that is far simpler.)

huangchengsir 3mo ago

[flagged]

marvinstrauch 3mo ago

[flagged]

aliyome 3mo ago

Isn't that exactly what kamal-proxy is for?