Comment by Eritico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eritico | Hacker News Reader

Its just a very bad and uneducated stand from some person.

I'm running a small k8s instance at home, for a small startup and at my job in a big version.

Abstraction of VMs is a real benefit: Have you ever had to restart a VM because of some security issues? Yes? Were you worried that your server comes up again?

With k8s, you know that 1. its cloud native to a certain extend. It will come up again because it came up before. 2. you have more nodes available. Either to surge or because you have more than just one node running.

Your pod will be scheduled away from your node, thats it.

you have a very stable and smart abstraction layer for sooo many features you get as soon as you configure them ONCE centrally:

- LoadBalancing

- certificate management

- Volume abstraction -> making snapshots from your PV? yes!

- Rollout strategies

- health checks (readiness and liveness probes)

- declaritive style (setup a prometheus, every service can be autoscraped due to convetion over configuration)

- Certified opensource abstraction layer! (get yourself a certified k8s distribution and stop worrying about vendor lock in)

- Unified setup for plenty of apps (monitoring, logging, app store, tracing, storage systems, iam etc. etc. etc.) We had deb before and rpm and whatnot. Now you have a helm chart for a certified k8s platform)

- Already quite small -> there is k3s. ubuntu supports it also with not that much overhead

- IaC as first class citizen. Due to k8s being declarative, IaC is much easier than it was before.

- FOSS

- Central easy policy implementation and management. Write your central policies, allow your teams to manage their own namespace and make sure to allow only certain registries etc.

- ArgoCD / GitOps (a dream come true srsly!)

I cant understate how much i love k8s and how much better it is then everything i have seen before. This is the main reason why i even spend the time writing here because that çritical review' is just utterly bullshit.

Did we had similiar things somehow before? yes. So whats new on k8s? K8s unites across companies and just drives this further. For me k8s is the winner of this race which happened in parallel (mesos, docker, nomad etc. etc.)

Agreed, I have a small 3 node cluster at home and I use all of those things you listed. I had to dive very deep in the details and learn a ton of new things to get it right, and I had all the time I wanted because it was just for fun and learning. It's almost like having my open source self-hosted AWS (in terms of abstraction from infra, not in reliability)

Would I host any of my critical side projects on my cluster? Probably not. Kubernetes was made with large organizations (google made it after all) in mind. As a solo developer, it's better for me to host my apps on a VM and move to AWS/Azure/GCP if I need to scale.

I am sorry you feel that way. The point of the article was not really attempting to address the feature sets of Kubernetes (which I also have issues with), it was really about the sales pitch being delivered by Google.

I have A LOT of issues with the things you posted above, and I hope to address them in future articles. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for reading.

I still don't get your motivation on writing your criticism.

What is your endgoal? Getting people not to like k8s? Because you don't like to work with it?

To push people away from k8s?

How do you add value to the current infrastructure/platform ecosystem by 'hating' on it without providing something different?

Of course companies present this k8s story as a successful thing. Why would that documentary be negative?

And while you have 'A LOT of issues with the things you posted above' just to be clear: For me and a lot of other people who like kubernetes, it solves real problems, its a great choice and there are of course things which need to be optimized. But if you only rant about it in the next blog post from you, i'm not seeing any value you really add to the ecosystem.

For me, i never seen anything like kubernetes in the last 12 years. I can get certified k8s from many companies in many different forms (gke, aks, aws, digitalocean, ranger, rke2, k3s, minicube, microk8s). ArgoCD is a dream come true.

Can you do it differently with other tools? Yes sure, did we ever had something like k8s before? no. We never had that holistic view on Infrastructure in such a FOSS project.

Again what do you want to achieve? A real discussion on specific issues or just hating against something? Or doyou have the feeling that the blog posts writing about k8s are to one sided?

I think the emperor is wearing no clothes. I want to move that discussion forward. I feel it is inevitable.

K8s doesn't solve problems which haven't been solved before. It doesn't do any particular magic in itself. The handful of things kubernetes does, are easy to explain but the impact is big nonetheless.

It is trustworthy because it is FOSS, certified and lots of companies use it because of this.

Lets take Java vs. PHP: PHP is developed by one group of people. Thats it. There was facebook hhvm/php alternative which then became something independent of php. Quite frustrating if you were hoping that Facebook gives back to the community.

Then take java: you have a spec, you have a reference implementation and then you have validated alternatives of it. At least you had this for a long time on the JavaEE area and with the oracle support thing, you also now have independent JVMs. This makes Java, in my opinion, better. This makes it a great platform, easy to migrate out of one ecosystem and it prevents 'vendor lock-in'.

Nomad is from hashicorp. You have mesos which works well as well. But no normal cloud provider provides nomad or mesos as a service. They provide their own thing. App Engine, Heroku etc.

Kubernetes broke through this. Lots of smaller cloud providers provide a managed kubernetes. You can see kubernetes here as the universal appengine if you like. Google provides Autogke. Their managed kubernetes service which abstracts away k8s even further. This interface, k8s provides, allows you to run your k8s based workloads at home, onprem, in private, in any other cloud provider AND on Google.

Instead of having Vendor lock-in it switches the operation model of those companies: They can't lock you in as easily before so they need to make the best offering for it. It switches the mental model and the level of competition to a more consumer/customer focused level.

It is very similar on a mental model switch as what Microsoft did with linux: Instead of hating against linux, they embrase it now and incorporate it. I never considered windows as a good developer OS just because of the missing shell support or the required workarounds or the non native cli feeling it gave you. Now i can use WSL2 and it becomes a real option.

For me, k8s is THE FOSS infrastructure abstraction layer. Protected and aligned through the CNCF and certification process.

Btw. the CNCF is from the Linux Foundation.

Hi you are getting into details out of the scope of this article. I want to address your points but in an article, then we can link it on HN and discuss it there.

The CNCF is an entirely different beast... which I have already started writing about already. It is the Mos Eisley of Open source. I am just kidding, it is not that bad.

You asked why I was writing this, and I told you why.

> I still don't get your motivation on writing your criticism.

OP is an AWS consultant. Kubernetes is/was designed to make his skillset irrelevant. And he alludes to it in several places.

This is nothing but a poorly researched hit piece on K8s completely detached from reality

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