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Comment by qbasic_forever | Hacker News Reader

I've been working in distributed systems for 20 years and k8s is the best yet. The docs are quite good: https://kubernetes.io/docs/home/ The community is growing and despite the Google connection, it's not dominated or controlled by them. Distributed systems are a huge problem space to learn and IMHO I think too many people get frustrated trying to learn all of that, on top of all the k8s tooling and conventions. There's no real shortcut other than getting in and building experience. K8s is by far the easiest system yet to do that--spin up a cluster with kind right now (https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/), it will take 5 minutes, and start playing with the learning tutorials: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/

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I think you’re both right. It is definitely the easiest and most intuitive distributed system, and it’s also difficult to understand how all the pieces fit together. Just getting a typical web app deployed requires a container for the app, a pod definition, a DB container, a stateful set, a persistent volume for DB and possibly app storage, a persistent volume claim, a service, an ingress, something like cert manager to to handle creating a cert and attaching it to the ingress, etc. It all makes sense when you’ve done it a few times but it can seem quite overbearing even to someone who’s a fan of docker-compose.

most of that is boilerplate and not actually anything difficult

I'm new to distributed systems and k8s was a long steep learning curve to even get something running. Unfortunately, most of what i've learnt is by running into "how can I do that" followed by intense googling, reading blogs, docs and stackoverflow. Its after i've spent hours getting it to work, that i now can start looking into why and how it works which are usually rabbit holes on their own.

I wish i could start with the concepts of distributed systems, play around in something meant for learning and then map that knowledge to the kubernetes world.

But nothing i could find was even remotely helpful. Most content around this originates in research or academia making it harder to apply and learn on real problems -- the way I'm used to learning.

When learning trying to learn k8s, I found that k3s was a great starting point.

Having the ingress controller already preconfigured meant it was much easier to get up and running with a deployment and service.

I’ve just started down this path and I agree. K3os makes setting up a cluster in a VM dead simple and from there it’s really easy to play around with. Especially using snapshots for the VM in case you break your cluster and need to revert.

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