Comment by cfors | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cfors | Hacker News Reader

Yes, Kubernetes is a surefire way to shoot yourself in the foot. To be able to use it effectively, you essentially need a dedicated team that knows the ins and outs of a rather complex API as well as deep networking, Linux and distributed system knowledge.

However this article takes a bunch of pot shots at Kubernetes that I don't necessarily think are correct. First off, not everyone needs Kubernetes [0].

Second, migrating a company with as much software as Google off of Borg is not a trivial process. They even failed before by trying to create its supposed successor, Omega.

Third, the argument about "open-sourceable" is a strawman argument that doesn't make sense.

As for the attack on container security, I don't understand the argument that was necessarily made there but at this point I'm not sure it deserved a rebuttal because all software is inherently insecure.

> You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes.

- Theo De Raadt (NetBSD founder)

At the end of the day, yes Kubernetes is complicated but it is not for a company running 25 VPS servers. It's for companies to replace legacy, expensive datacenter virtualization they have paid a lot of money in licensing fees for.

[0] https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/you-might-not-need-k8s/

I’ll argue that if your company is running more or less the same binary on 25 VPS servers, Kubernetes is definitely something to consider.

Yes, ______ is a surefire way to shoot yourself in the foot. To be able to use it effectively, you essentially need a dedicated team that knows the ins and outs of a rather complex API as well as deep networking, Linux and distributed system knowledge.

Fill in the blank!

At the end of the day, yes Kubernetes is complicated but it is not for a company running 25 VPS servers.

How big is this market niche?

actually kubernetes also works for the small scale. if you have more than 1 server you either need one of the following or combine it:

- automation - configuration management - scheduling - load balancing - provisioning

you can than either built it yourself, probably with the help of ansible/puppet,... or you can just use kubespray+k8s or any other "managed" k8s thingy.

of course if you try to manage more than 1 server you at least need some understanding of networking (but probably not that deep than you think), understanding of namepsaces or virtualisation (unless you think it's a good idea to run 1000 tools on one host without at least limit their cpu/memory/io usage) and you probably need knowledge of linux and also at least a little bit of knowing how distributed leader election might work. But no matter what, if you run more than one system you need to have somebody that is capable of that.

You're right, it absolutely would work! I was just making a point that it might not be worth the effort to learn Kubernetes for that use case.

I like k8s but this is way too optimistic.

I regularly run long-standing 20+ instance clusters using boto, pip, and a few hundred lines of python scripts. People have been doing some version of this for ~15 years.

K8s adds a lot of conceptual overhead on top of "just write a sysadmin script". It is absolutely not necessary to have an orchestration system as soon as you're past one instance.

It depends, of Course on aws stuff is a little Bit easier, especially zero downtime deployments. But thats not the case in on premise Environments

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