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Comment by mirceal | Hacker News Reader

i sort of disagree.

people want to copy google because 1) they like smart, complex things 2) they want to work on complex things.

nobody got an award and praise for choosing the simplest thing that could work, doing that and building a service that is so reliable that nobody knows it actually exists (ie no problems or incidents).

also, the tragedy of software development is that the squeaky wheel gets the grease and that pyromaniacs are working as firefighters. and are rewarded and promoted based on their firefighting skills. in contrast a well build house, with proper fire retardant materials, sprinkler systems and proper ventilation is meh and not exciting.

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> nobody got an award and praise for choosing the simplest thing that could work

Well, if that's true, that's where young software engineers have gone wrong.

The giants among us used to talk specifically about the power of doing the simplest thing that could possibly work: https://www.artima.com/articles/the-simplest-thing-that-coul...

there’s theory and there is practice.

i constantly have to ask the “kids” at work: do you need this? what tps do you need to support? how are you going to maintain this (at what cost)? do you really want to reinvent the wheel?

constantly. i am afraid that most people nowadays practice resume driven development.

my favorite pet subject is k8s.

well if we broke our app to 80 small services we might as well use a robust tool like k8s I guess? idk.

microservices, amiright?

k8s has its use cases, but i am always baffled by people refusing to use the abstraction the cloud they leverage provide (things like vms, load balancers, autoscaling groups) in the name of using some hot new tech and some benefits that are not clear to them (again nothing against using it if you understand it and fits your use case, but this is not what I reach for as the first thing)

Yeah I agree it can be overkill for many companies...k8s is quite a beast.

You still have to orchestrate your resources. Your cloud provider's console isn't good enough.

all clouds have services dedicated to orchestrating resources (cloudformation in aws land, deloyment manager in gcp, etc etc). K8s is not better suited for this purpose.

Managed Kubernetes has such low overhead though, and gives you so many options to play with later on (across clouds, on-prem, serverless). Some cloud providers don't even charge you for the control plane, so you're not even paying for the overhead.

If you've got a legacy application that doesn't play nice in containers, I get why you would stay away, but if you're writing something new- it's so easy to take advantage of K8s.

there. you captured it beautifully. “It’s sooo easy to play with K8s”.

If I can get away with a serverless service why bother with k8s?

If I can run my service inside a VM and front the service with a LB, why bother?

Kubernetes is a good tool to run a service inside a VM and front the service with an LB. And if you ever have a need for more than that- you're ready.

I think your argument is that K8s adds a lot of complexity, but that's just not true if you're using a managed service. If all you need is a couple of workers and ingress, you're set up in a few minutes

using a managed service for what? the k8s control plane?

so what are you actually using? containers?

> And if you ever have a need for more than that- you're ready. If you ever need more than that you can evaluate it at that time. K8s is creating the maintenance nightmares of tomorrow today.

I did a job interview today and showed one of my projects and its code, explaining some of the reasons why it's written the way it is.

Much of it is fairly straightforward and simple. That's fine, because it wouldn't really get a lot of advantage from more complexity. Even so, I felt almost ... embarrassed by the simplicity. It's not that I actually am, I think the code and overall project I showed is pretty good and something I'm proud of, it's just that explaining "yeah I just did it like this, pretty simple really" doesn't really sound all that impressive over "we integrated such-and-such fancy tools with the so-and-so pattern using the blockchain cloud nano-architecture running on o31h!"

I bet those engineers who interviewed you appreciated the simplicity, though. It probably seemed like a breath of fresh air.

i would definitely appreciate the simplicity. tell me about the business problem you solved!

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