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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

If you have a well-built and automated bare-metal deployment, it's no harder than switching cloud providers. At the scale where it makes sense to go bare metal, either would be a lot of effort.

An extra abstraction layer like k8s makes it a lot easier, which is exciting. It's also precisely why IBM bought Red Hat - a well-built k8s distribution like OpenShift is one of the very few real alternative to public clouds for many companies.

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> An extra abstraction layer like k8s makes it a lot easier, which is exciting. It's also precisely why IBM bought Red Hat - a well-built k8s distribution like OpenShift is one of the very few real alternative to public clouds for many companies.

OpenShift is built on a prescriptive mentality. They choose everything for you from OS through pipeline and many deviations are unsupported. As you mentioned there are others, but depending on your environment OpenShift is either a very good fit or square-peg-round-hole.

OpenShift is a superset of k8s, so you're free to customize it (you just won't get support if it breaks).

Openshift doesn't choose the pipeline. You can deploy to it however you want. Openshift is literally the same exact thing as kubernetes, with a simpler api and a nice ui. Openshift is extremely flexible and you can use it however you want. Don't know why you think it's so restrictive.

It has the same API as k8s. It's literally the same thing, OpenShift just adds some PaaS feature on top of k8s.

Which is precisely why I've run it for over 2 years now. The devs on my team love throwing a git URL into OpenShift and have a project go live in mere minutes, previously a more senior developer would need to setup a CI pipeline and deployment automation and even with experience it was a chore.

It's not like I'm personally afraid of k8s or building docker images myself either, but anything to help my team be more productive without needing to hold hands or do gruntwork on their behalf improves the lives of everyone.

Exactly right. I don't understand all those teams reinventing the wheel building custom k8s distributions, rather than using something like OpenShift and focusing on their core business.

Running custom k8s in production is the 2019 equivalent of using Gentoo.

You’re forgetting the network needs to be replaced too, there’s lead times on getting hardware, there the whole racking and cabling, and even at that if the this is due to a more complex networking issue then I can’t swap out the network since there are too many components and they’re shared by other teams. In the cloud I can do this quickly tho.

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