6 ms·

Do you really need Kubernetes?

28 points by stekern 2y ago

vrnvu 2y ago
I'd say 99% of companies using Kubernetes can't really explain why they chose it over Nomad.
- alex_lav 2y ago
  The entire reason is popularity/marketshare, and that's a really valid reason to choose tech like this.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Yep. Plenty of people on the market with experience, and your employees know it’s a skill with market value, so they won’t resent your choice and start eyeing the door.
  - beachy 2y ago
    Makes sense. And with LLMs training on what is publicly available, this becomes self-fulfilling, because you'll get better answers from AI about what is popular - not what is technically superior.
    - cassianoleal 2y ago
      That's already true on forums where answers depend on humans. It's possible that LLMs will make it even more prevalent but they won't have started the phenomenon.
- autoexecbat 2y ago
  It's easy. When I look at resumes that come in, a sea of people listing experience with k8s and rarely a mention of nomad. When your team has familiarity with something, it's a bit harder to suggest an alternative unless it's quite a lot better
- linuxandrew 2y ago
  Nomad isn't FOSS anymore, for one
- 1letterunixname 2y ago
  I don't think most companies can say why they're not at least isolating workloads with something like Kata Containers and why they're using only glorified cgroup jails, have an inventory of all the services they're running and why, can point to which machines have authoritative copies of data, how they back it up without replicating corruption, and how they'd do disaster recovery/BCP on it.
zer00eyz 2y ago
There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Learn about assets vs liablity (hang out with the accountants, they are nerds too). Do some engineering dont just be a feature factory. And if you are going to build features, make fuckin sure that you build tracking into them and hold the product teams feet to the fire when the numbers dont add up (see: friends with accountants, and tracking money).
- bigyikes 2y ago
  Cloud is an abstraction over hardware. lLike any good abstraction, it makes certain tradeoffs. Sometimes it makes sense to move to a lower level of abstraction, for performance, cost, or compatibility reasons. In this case, diving under the cloud and running your own servers could save 30% of your server costs. Cloud adoption has shown that many (most?) companies prefer the convenience over cost savings. Maybe optimizing hardware spend is not the best way to optimize a business.
  - bcaxis 2y ago
    AWS spends tons of engineering time on features you don't need. There is a lot more than 30% on the table.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > Not having hardware is someone else's profit. But it's also someone else's economies of scale. The chances of me getting datacenter space, hardware, bandwidth, and expert 24/7 staffing at the same volume discounts they do is... slim. Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    In most cases where your total needs are less than a dedicated server, you're probably correct. Once you hit that level, issues like network traffic, EBS volumes, etc, really start to creep that cloud bill up fast.
tredre3 2y ago
Related: https://doineedkubernetes.com/ https://doineedkubernetes.com/
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Does this site return something different if it detects a Google/Facebook/Amazon corporate IP visiting?
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Why would it? They have their own fleet management systems; Borg/Tupperware/ECS. I guess for the EKS team you'd say yeah.
  - 1letterunixname 2y ago
    It wouldn't be hard to check by BGP AS. Stack Overflow routinely didn't work at one MAANG because of egress from a narrow range of IPs appearing to be bot-like behavior, but it was really an enormous amount to traffic from ~10k's of users.
Temporary_31337 2y ago
It’s funny that for an exactly same workload on AWS on raw Ec2 it ends up cheaper than the same cluster size on EKS…
- bdcravens 2y ago
  That is true of every managed service on AWS.
z3t4 2y ago
Related "Dilbert on Kubernetes"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bhouston 2y ago
I found that just using CloudRun and similar technologies is simpler and easier to manage than kubernetes. You need auto scaling, fast startup, limit number of concurrent connections to each instance, and scale to zero functionality.
- clintonb 2y ago
  I agree that Cloud Run greatly simplifies deployments. Unfortunately, it only auto-scales based on requests and, eventually, CPU. We are in the process of moving our Temporal workers from Cloud Run to GKE Autopilot, which is ~30% cheaper given we can use arm64 Scale-Out nodes.
bdcravens 2y ago
No. We chose ECS instead :-) That said, we are planning on doing a cloud exit in the future. I don't feel we need Kubernetes, but we do need to orchestrate containers. In our case, it's less scale, and more isolation.
ekidd 2y ago
Your first full-time sysadmin is an expensive hire. So is your first DBA. And even if your database backups are working now, there's a good chance they'll silently break in the next several years. The simplest thing you could do is to build a single-container application, and deploy it a Heroku-like system with a fully managed database. If this actually works for your use case, then definitely avoid Kubernetes. But eventually you'll reach a point where you need to run a dozen different things, spread out across a bunch of servers. You'll need cron jobs and Grafana and maybe some centralized way to manage secrets. You'll need a bunch of other things. At this point, a managed Kuberentes cluster is no worse than any other option. It's lighter weight than 50 pages of Terraform. You won't need to worry about how to get customized init scripts into an autoscaling group. The price is that you'll need to read an O'Reily book, you'll need to write a moderate amount of YAML, and you'll need to pay attention to the signs reading Here There Be Dragons. Kuberentes isn't the only way to tackle problems at this scale. But I've used Terraform and ECS and Chef and even a custom RPM package repo. And none of these approaches were signficantly simpler than Kubernetes once you deployed a full, working system for a medium-sized organization.
- alex_lav 2y ago
  > At this point, a managed Kuberentes cluster is no worse than any other option Except in terms of pricing...?
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    K3s adds minor overhead to my single node $8/mo vps. Edit: no, not managed. Quite easy to get started with though. Edit2: took ~440MB of ram & 3% CPU (most of the CPU is the local storage provisioner, weirdly?). Why? Because it was much easier than continuing to maintain and run the handcraft Ansible scripts I've done over the years, and let me easily manage DNS, certs, metrics, two dbs, and its easier to reuse these on my other infra than any other option.
    - alex_lav 2y ago
      Is this "managed Kubernetes" then?
aeturnum 2y ago
For small teams I also think Kubernetes often greatly complicates the per-service operational overhead by making it much more difficult for most engineers to manage their own deployments. You will inevitably reach a point that engineers need to collaborate with infra folks, but in my experience that point gets moved up a lot by using Kubernetes.
doctor_eval 2y ago
I’m sceptical of this article. I’m an indy dev using K8s at vultr (VKS) and it’s absolutely simplified my life. The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s, but if I do that, I now have to manage an entire operating system. I have to make sure the OS is up to date, and balance all the nuances this entails, especially balancing downtimes, and recovery from upgrades. Major OS upgrades are hard, and pretty much guarantee downtime unless you’re running multiple instances in which case how are you managing them? Contrast to VKS where, with much less effort, OS upgrades are rolled out to nodes with no downtime to my app. Yes, getting to this point takes a little bit of effort, but not much. And yes, I have multiple redundant VPS, which is more expensive, but that’s a feature. K8s is perhaps overly verbose, and like all technologies it has a learning curve, but im gonna go out on a limb here and say that I’ve found running a managed K8s service like VKS is way easier than managing even a single Debian server, and provides a pile of functionality that is difficult or impossible to achieve with a single VPS. And the moment you have more than one VPS, it needs to be managed, so you’re back at needing some kind of orchestration. The complexity of maintaining a unix system should not be underestimated just because you already know how to do it. K8s makes my life easier because it does not just abstract away the underlying node operating system, it obviates it. In doing so, it brings its own complexities, but there’s nothing I miss about managing operating systems. Nothing.
- stekern 2y ago
  (Author here) The main focus of the post is to highlight some of the long-term risks and consequences of standardizing around Kubernetes in an org. If you've done a proper evaluation, and still think Kubernetes makes sense for you, then it's probably a sound decision. But I think many skip the evaluation step or do it hastily. The post is more targeted towards organizations with at least a handful of employees. What works for an indy dev does not necessarily scale and work for SMBs or larger orgs - those are very different contexts. > The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s Not quite. I suggest strongly considering using managed services when it makes sense for your organization. The equivalent of k8s in terms of managed services would be Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) as the control plane, perhaps with AWS Fargate as the compute runtime. (I wouldn't really call EC2 a managed service - it's more in the territory of Infrastructure as a Service)
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
There's some legit notions here, but overwhelmingly it uses insinuation & suggestion to sow Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. > Despite its portability, Kubernetes also introduces a form of lock-in – not to a specific vendor, but to a paradigm that may have implications on your architecture and organizational structure. It can lead to tunnel vision where all solutions are made to fit into Kubernetes instead of using the right tool for the job. This seems a bit absurd on a number of fronts. It doesn't shape architecture that much, in my view; it runs your stuff. Leading to tunnel vision, preventing the right tool for the job? That doesn't seem to be a particularly real issue; most big services have some kind of Kubernetes operator that seems to work just fine. Kubernetes seems to do a pretty fine job of exposing platform, in a flexible and consistent fashion. If it was highly opinionated or specific, it probably wouldn't have gotten where it is.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  >>> This seems a bit absurd on a number of fronts. It doesn't shape architecture that much, in my view; it runs your stuff. I mean, let's be candid. There are plenty of times where "containers" are bags of shit software that were pushing into production and throwing hardware at them to keep things going. There are containers out there with out of date libraries that aren't getting updated cause the "work" and no one gives a shit. If you can get away with that, what is the incentive to do highly integrated engineering that produces diagonal scalability? Why be WhatsApp when you can just throw money at bad software?
  - jauntywundrkind 2y ago
    Containers can be a crutch for poor software maintenance, oh sure! Lots and lots of companies skate by with shoddy container infrastructure (often to relatively little ill impact imo). But I don't see much opportunity that is opened up by getting away from containers. One can do "highly integrated engineering that produces diagonal scalability" just as easily on containers as not, in my view. Containers don't inhibit much. WhatsApp remains the glorious one example of ultra-efficient software. Way to go taking ejabberd+erlang and going far!! But does that path exclude Kubernetes? I doubt it. That architecture would have ran fine as containers or+and on Kubernetes. It wouldn't have made a material difference to what they were doing. It just would have been a different way to manage the underlying platform. Who knows, maybe it would have provided some patterns/templates/apiserver-ing that the team would have found useful to develop atop, to build forward on, that they instead had to build themselves?
1letterunixname 2y ago
Hey now, I made a killing in AWS consulting to convince megacorps to get rid of their own hardware and avoid going the OpenStack route. The problems of pre-IaaS and pre-K8s were manageability, flexibility, and capacity utilization. These problems still haven't really been solved to a standardized, interoperable, and uniform manner because stacks continue to mushroom in complexity. Oxide appears to be on the right track but there is much that can be done to reduce the amount of tinkering, redundant abstractions, and avoiding conventional lifecycle management and cross-cutting concerns that people don't want to think about whenever another new way comes along.

28 points by stekern 2y ago

vrnvu 2y ago

I'd say 99% of companies using Kubernetes can't really explain why they chose it over Nomad.

alex_lav 2y ago
The entire reason is popularity/marketshare, and that's a really valid reason to choose tech like this.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Yep. Plenty of people on the market with experience, and your employees know it’s a skill with market value, so they won’t resent your choice and start eyeing the door.
- beachy 2y ago
  Makes sense. And with LLMs training on what is publicly available, this becomes self-fulfilling, because you'll get better answers from AI about what is popular - not what is technically superior.
  - cassianoleal 2y ago
    That's already true on forums where answers depend on humans. It's possible that LLMs will make it even more prevalent but they won't have started the phenomenon.
autoexecbat 2y ago
It's easy. When I look at resumes that come in, a sea of people listing experience with k8s and rarely a mention of nomad. When your team has familiarity with something, it's a bit harder to suggest an alternative unless it's quite a lot better
linuxandrew 2y ago
Nomad isn't FOSS anymore, for one
1letterunixname 2y ago
I don't think most companies can say why they're not at least isolating workloads with something like Kata Containers and why they're using only glorified cgroup jails, have an inventory of all the services they're running and why, can point to which machines have authoritative copies of data, how they back it up without replicating corruption, and how they'd do disaster recovery/BCP on it.

zer00eyz 2y ago

There is a corollary to this: Do you really need cloud infrastructure? Cattle not pets right? Well, no. Have you seen amazons AWS margins? Its 30%. After amazon buys hardware, pays people to run it, it still makes 30%. Not having hardware is someone else's profit. That isnt cattle, its contract poultry farming. Learn capacity planing. Learn to write cachable, scalable apps. Track your hardware spend per customer. Learn about assets vs liablity (hang out with the accountants, they are nerds too). Do some engineering dont just be a feature factory. And if you are going to build features, make fuckin sure that you build tracking into them and hold the product teams feet to the fire when the numbers dont add up (see: friends with accountants, and tracking money).

bigyikes 2y ago
Cloud is an abstraction over hardware. lLike any good abstraction, it makes certain tradeoffs. Sometimes it makes sense to move to a lower level of abstraction, for performance, cost, or compatibility reasons. In this case, diving under the cloud and running your own servers could save 30% of your server costs. Cloud adoption has shown that many (most?) companies prefer the convenience over cost savings. Maybe optimizing hardware spend is not the best way to optimize a business.
- bcaxis 2y ago
  AWS spends tons of engineering time on features you don't need. There is a lot more than 30% on the table.
ceejayoz 2y ago
> Not having hardware is someone else's profit. But it's also someone else's economies of scale. The chances of me getting datacenter space, hardware, bandwidth, and expert 24/7 staffing at the same volume discounts they do is... slim. Particularly for the small amounts I'd need.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  In most cases where your total needs are less than a dedicated server, you're probably correct. Once you hit that level, issues like network traffic, EBS volumes, etc, really start to creep that cloud bill up fast.

tredre3 2y ago

Related: https://doineedkubernetes.com/ https://doineedkubernetes.com/

ceejayoz 2y ago
Does this site return something different if it detects a Google/Facebook/Amazon corporate IP visiting?
- fragmede 2y ago
  Why would it? They have their own fleet management systems; Borg/Tupperware/ECS. I guess for the EKS team you'd say yeah.
- 1letterunixname 2y ago
  It wouldn't be hard to check by BGP AS. Stack Overflow routinely didn't work at one MAANG because of egress from a narrow range of IPs appearing to be bot-like behavior, but it was really an enormous amount to traffic from ~10k's of users.

Temporary_31337 2y ago

It’s funny that for an exactly same workload on AWS on raw Ec2 it ends up cheaper than the same cluster size on EKS…

bdcravens 2y ago
That is true of every managed service on AWS.

z3t4 2y ago

Related "Dilbert on Kubernetes"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bhouston 2y ago

I found that just using CloudRun and similar technologies is simpler and easier to manage than kubernetes. You need auto scaling, fast startup, limit number of concurrent connections to each instance, and scale to zero functionality.

clintonb 2y ago
I agree that Cloud Run greatly simplifies deployments. Unfortunately, it only auto-scales based on requests and, eventually, CPU. We are in the process of moving our Temporal workers from Cloud Run to GKE Autopilot, which is ~30% cheaper given we can use arm64 Scale-Out nodes.

bdcravens 2y ago

No. We chose ECS instead :-) That said, we are planning on doing a cloud exit in the future. I don't feel we need Kubernetes, but we do need to orchestrate containers. In our case, it's less scale, and more isolation.

ekidd 2y ago

Your first full-time sysadmin is an expensive hire. So is your first DBA. And even if your database backups are working now, there's a good chance they'll silently break in the next several years. The simplest thing you could do is to build a single-container application, and deploy it a Heroku-like system with a fully managed database. If this actually works for your use case, then definitely avoid Kubernetes. But eventually you'll reach a point where you need to run a dozen different things, spread out across a bunch of servers. You'll need cron jobs and Grafana and maybe some centralized way to manage secrets. You'll need a bunch of other things. At this point, a managed Kuberentes cluster is no worse than any other option. It's lighter weight than 50 pages of Terraform. You won't need to worry about how to get customized init scripts into an autoscaling group. The price is that you'll need to read an O'Reily book, you'll need to write a moderate amount of YAML, and you'll need to pay attention to the signs reading Here There Be Dragons. Kuberentes isn't the only way to tackle problems at this scale. But I've used Terraform and ECS and Chef and even a custom RPM package repo. And none of these approaches were signficantly simpler than Kubernetes once you deployed a full, working system for a medium-sized organization.

alex_lav 2y ago
> At this point, a managed Kuberentes cluster is no worse than any other option Except in terms of pricing...?
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  K3s adds minor overhead to my single node $8/mo vps. Edit: no, not managed. Quite easy to get started with though. Edit2: took ~440MB of ram & 3% CPU (most of the CPU is the local storage provisioner, weirdly?). Why? Because it was much easier than continuing to maintain and run the handcraft Ansible scripts I've done over the years, and let me easily manage DNS, certs, metrics, two dbs, and its easier to reuse these on my other infra than any other option.
  - alex_lav 2y ago
    Is this "managed Kubernetes" then?

aeturnum 2y ago

For small teams I also think Kubernetes often greatly complicates the per-service operational overhead by making it much more difficult for most engineers to manage their own deployments. You will inevitably reach a point that engineers need to collaborate with infra folks, but in my experience that point gets moved up a lot by using Kubernetes.

doctor_eval 2y ago

I’m sceptical of this article. I’m an indy dev using K8s at vultr (VKS) and it’s absolutely simplified my life. The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s, but if I do that, I now have to manage an entire operating system. I have to make sure the OS is up to date, and balance all the nuances this entails, especially balancing downtimes, and recovery from upgrades. Major OS upgrades are hard, and pretty much guarantee downtime unless you’re running multiple instances in which case how are you managing them? Contrast to VKS where, with much less effort, OS upgrades are rolled out to nodes with no downtime to my app. Yes, getting to this point takes a little bit of effort, but not much. And yes, I have multiple redundant VPS, which is more expensive, but that’s a feature. K8s is perhaps overly verbose, and like all technologies it has a learning curve, but im gonna go out on a limb here and say that I’ve found running a managed K8s service like VKS is way easier than managing even a single Debian server, and provides a pile of functionality that is difficult or impossible to achieve with a single VPS. And the moment you have more than one VPS, it needs to be managed, so you’re back at needing some kind of orchestration. The complexity of maintaining a unix system should not be underestimated just because you already know how to do it. K8s makes my life easier because it does not just abstract away the underlying node operating system, it obviates it. In doing so, it brings its own complexities, but there’s nothing I miss about managing operating systems. Nothing.

stekern 2y ago
(Author here) The main focus of the post is to highlight some of the long-term risks and consequences of standardizing around Kubernetes in an org. If you've done a proper evaluation, and still think Kubernetes makes sense for you, then it's probably a sound decision. But I think many skip the evaluation step or do it hastily. The post is more targeted towards organizations with at least a handful of employees. What works for an indy dev does not necessarily scale and work for SMBs or larger orgs - those are very different contexts. > The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s Not quite. I suggest strongly considering using managed services when it makes sense for your organization. The equivalent of k8s in terms of managed services would be Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) as the control plane, perhaps with AWS Fargate as the compute runtime. (I wouldn't really call EC2 a managed service - it's more in the territory of Infrastructure as a Service)

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

There's some legit notions here, but overwhelmingly it uses insinuation & suggestion to sow Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. > Despite its portability, Kubernetes also introduces a form of lock-in – not to a specific vendor, but to a paradigm that may have implications on your architecture and organizational structure. It can lead to tunnel vision where all solutions are made to fit into Kubernetes instead of using the right tool for the job. This seems a bit absurd on a number of fronts. It doesn't shape architecture that much, in my view; it runs your stuff. Leading to tunnel vision, preventing the right tool for the job? That doesn't seem to be a particularly real issue; most big services have some kind of Kubernetes operator that seems to work just fine. Kubernetes seems to do a pretty fine job of exposing platform, in a flexible and consistent fashion. If it was highly opinionated or specific, it probably wouldn't have gotten where it is.

zer00eyz 2y ago
>>> This seems a bit absurd on a number of fronts. It doesn't shape architecture that much, in my view; it runs your stuff. I mean, let's be candid. There are plenty of times where "containers" are bags of shit software that were pushing into production and throwing hardware at them to keep things going. There are containers out there with out of date libraries that aren't getting updated cause the "work" and no one gives a shit. If you can get away with that, what is the incentive to do highly integrated engineering that produces diagonal scalability? Why be WhatsApp when you can just throw money at bad software?
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Containers can be a crutch for poor software maintenance, oh sure! Lots and lots of companies skate by with shoddy container infrastructure (often to relatively little ill impact imo). But I don't see much opportunity that is opened up by getting away from containers. One can do "highly integrated engineering that produces diagonal scalability" just as easily on containers as not, in my view. Containers don't inhibit much. WhatsApp remains the glorious one example of ultra-efficient software. Way to go taking ejabberd+erlang and going far!! But does that path exclude Kubernetes? I doubt it. That architecture would have ran fine as containers or+and on Kubernetes. It wouldn't have made a material difference to what they were doing. It just would have been a different way to manage the underlying platform. Who knows, maybe it would have provided some patterns/templates/apiserver-ing that the team would have found useful to develop atop, to build forward on, that they instead had to build themselves?

1letterunixname 2y ago

Hey now, I made a killing in AWS consulting to convince megacorps to get rid of their own hardware and avoid going the OpenStack route. The problems of pre-IaaS and pre-K8s were manageability, flexibility, and capacity utilization. These problems still haven't really been solved to a standardized, interoperable, and uniform manner because stacks continue to mushroom in complexity. Oxide appears to be on the right track but there is much that can be done to reduce the amount of tinkering, redundant abstractions, and avoiding conventional lifecycle management and cross-cutting concerns that people don't want to think about whenever another new way comes along.