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Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

Is that right?

K8S is basically another answer to Conway’s Law. Every startup I’ve worked at switched to it because then the infrastructure could map more closely to the code. Not unlike microservices at a higher level.

The old-skool approach is depending on a team of SREs or sysadmins to provision hardware for you and basically handle the deployment, which K8S plus container images basically abstract away.

Not to say that dedicating resources to platform development (k8s style) isn’t a time sink when you’re trying to build product and find a fit in the market.

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In my experience, giving code preferential treatment is how you end up with complexity lunacy; so I’ll add an addendum to Conway’s Law:

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure — and which mirrors the skills of its key creators.”

K8s is designed to solve Google problems. Your startup will not have Google problems. Your startup will have Pinterest problems, or Gitlab problems, or Reddit problems — at which point you do not need K8s; you need someone who knows infra (which I expect devs to be working on distributed systems to understand).

Using K8s in a startup context is a sign of conformist thinking, detached from any critical aspect.

> The old-skool approach is depending on a team of SREs or sysadmins to provision hardware for you

This assumes that K8s won't require a "team of SREs". My experience is you need the same amount of SREs to maintain Kubernetes, probably more, because now you have a complicated control plane, a networking nightmare, then you layer that on top of resource-contention issues, security issues, cloud provider compatibility issues, buggy controllers, the list goes on.

The only thing K8s is great for is the maintainers, the consultants, and highly experienced SREs that inevitably have to be hired to clean up the mess that was created. This is my experience working in two similar sized environments, one with >1M containers, and another with an equivalent scale of bare metal servers.

then you layer that on top of resource-contention issues, security issues, and the list goes on.

applications running on bare metal don't have resource contention issues? or security issues?

Conway's law is about mapping teams to code+infrastructure (generally: areas of responsibility), not about mapping code to infrastructure. It's about people and politics.

You're right that K8S is an answer to Conway's Law: our people don't get along or can't collaborate or we have too many of them, so we will split them into team per service and force them to collaborate over network interfaces. Likewise, the infrastructure people will communicate with the other teams using Dockerfiles.

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