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Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

> It's the science of thinking you'll be Google next week,

There's other reasons to use K8s than just thinking of massive scale.

Setting up environments becomes a massive PITA when working directly with VMs. The end result is either custom scripts, which is a messier version of terraform, which ends up being messier than just writing a couple of manifest files for a managed k8s.

> anyone with K8s experience is demanding $150k + 10% Superannuation here in Australia... minimum!

sheds a tear for CAD salaries and poor career decisions

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> Setting up environments becomes a massive PITA when working directly with VMs. The end result is either custom scripts, which is a messier version of terraform, which ends up being messier than just writing a couple of manifest files for a managed k8s.

The author advocates using a high-level PaaS. For sure working directly with VMs is the wrong answer to premature optimization, but as an early stage startup, there's plenty of services around that you basically just need to point your Git repo at and you'll have a reasonable infrastructure set up for you.

OP here, I agree. You can get super far with a service like fly.io/Heroku/Netlify/Vercel etc. (pick the one that works with your stack). VMs are an anti-pattern as well for the early stages of an application or startup.

I find those solutions end up being harder once you have to integrate something new you didn't know you needed. And the cost, at least for something like Heroku, is MORE than using something like GKE where I don't need a new dyno for every service. I consider GKE (and DO's and AWS's equivalent k8s solutions) on the same platform level as a fly.io/Heroku/etc.

> Setting up environments becomes a massive PITA when working directly with VMs.

I guess I've just never found this to be true.

My main goal when engineering a solution is always, "Keep It Super Simple (KISS), so that a junior engineer can maintain and evolve it."

Working directly with operating systems, VMs, networking, etc. (purely in Cloud - never on-prem... come on it's 2022!) is the simplest form of engineering and is much easier than most claim.

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