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Comment by hintymad | Hacker News Reader

Curious question: why don’t companies consider an abstraction like EC2? They can run k8s on EC2-like virtualization, right? I had great experience with EC2: the ability to launch thousands of machines reliably with full control to the machines, the ability to manipulate all the metadata and configuration without learning any additional shit like HCL is a huge productivity booster. The simplicity of EC2 seems a great foundation layer for us to build more advanced resource allocation.

Case in point, it drives me nuts that one has to spend hours learning how to use a template system in Nomad to pass in the simplest configurations. I can’t fathom why one would be even slightly interested in learning any shit of Nomad just to deploy a god damn docker container. Don’t we have more interesting problems to solve and more general knowledge to master?

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EC2 instance boots in 2 to 3 minutes, a Docker container starts in seconds. You can specify precisely how much CPU/Memory you need for a container, with a VM, you're stuck with what the cloud provider offers. You still need to get your app artifacts on that VM, how do you plan to do this?

EC2 (VM abstraction) is great for some type of software, but don't forget you'll also need a Load Balancer, provisioning TLS certs, security groups, autoscaling groups, VPN, public/private subnets…

Oh, I love container-based deployment. I was just wondering if it’s worth building abstractions like EC2 that requires very little learning to use, use EC2-like systems to manage machines that host containers

That’s ECS without the Fargate.

ec2 alpine on t3.small boots in 30 seconds. 45 seconds for spot.

default-like vpc with public subnets and internet gateway is fine. zero trust.

route53 health checks and returns up to 8 hosts in random order.

to the gp’s point, using aws sdk to manage ec2 is shockingly easy. a lambda on a 1 minute timer with an aws sdk runs circles around autoscaling groups et al.

> with a VM, you're stuck with what the cloud provider offers

AWS has a very big menu of machine types.

A lot of choice yes, but they are all either slow or overpriced.

Kubernetes on AWS won't be cheaper. And if you go with another provider, they're likely to also have an API to automatically provision VMs.

I highly recommend the kops[1] tool from Kubernetes if opting to deploy/manage Kubernetes yourself. I’ve had great experiences with it in the past (have been using since before EKS or Fargate existed).

kops let’s you define your Kubernetes cluster in yaml, then can deploy directly or output terraform that you can use to deploy.

1. https://github.com/kubernetes/kops

> Curious question: why don’t companies consider an abstraction like EC2?

That suggestion doesn't make any sense.

It's like you want the price gouging of AWS but the problems of managing your own custom low-level infrastructure.

If you really want to throw money at AWS and you want Kubernetes, it's hard to argue in favour of any option other than AWS's managed Kubernetes service: EKS.

Your goal is to get an app running, not to manage a cluster that has an app running.

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