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Comment by 100011_100001 | Hacker News Reader

Using Docker on EC2 but not Kubernetes is like using a car but deciding you will never use the gas or break pedals. At that point might as well walk (simpler) or fly (use Kubernetes).

They have essentially semi mocked Kubernetes without any of the benefits.

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As someone working in a place where we did the same (and it was mainly my idea), I beg to differ. You don't have to learn/cope with all the new low level k8s plumbing, especially pre-EKS. Just plain old EC2, in an immutable fashion, just using docker as your package manager instead of baking a RPM or DEB. ANd even with the advent of EKS in AWS there are still a lot of overlapping functionalities and new failure modes (HPA and its metrics/limited rules WRT EC2 ASG rules, coreDNS etc).

That's not really true. Running a service and orchestrating a fleet of services are two entirely separate problems. The orchestration requirements for many workloads are different than what k8s provides.

If your orchestration needs aren't "use every last % of server capacity" you might not need k8s.

I’m not sure I follow. Kubernetes is “just” an orchestrator for handling containers. This company use Docker Engine directly for handling their containers. They still get the benefit of containers even if they don’t happen to use Kubernetes. What’s wrong with that?

Docker Engine is not a scheduler. It’s a container runtime. It doesn’t have visibility over all your VMs, networking etc.

Indeed. But in the article he mentioned that they have other tools for doing that kind of stuff.

Kubernetes is not for orchestrating container workloads, it's for making orchestrated containers __portable__.

Portable between what?

They are using cloudformation which predates Kubernetes and it's meant to solve the same problem. CloudFormation still uses docker, originally it used AMIs. I've worked for a lot of Fortune 500 companies that don't use Kubernetes and use Docker.

I'll take a walk most of the time (virtual instance provisioned with shell script). Flying yes, but only with pilots and the crew - no way in hell I'll start tinkering with it on my own as a sidetask.

I might use a different analogy -- it might be more like using a bike versus a motorcycle. You can run a delivery business on a bike, but you'd be able to do it with much less tinkering, if you were using a motorcycle.

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