I knew literally nothing about k8s in September and now I have multiple clusters humming along, treating the worker cluster nodes as a generic pool of compute, autoscaling the cluster as well as the pods inside it. Upgrading is a breeze, I have great observability, I can deploy experiments and new applications with a single CI step or click, in fact I have nodes that are killed and get replaced for cost savings by SpotInst in the middle of the business day and I don't even need to know about it. My load balancers and even DNS are all provisioned for me and I can use the same Helm charts to create an identical staging and production environment.
Kubernetes IS the spirit of the Cloud and 12 factor apps. It's not that scary, and with tools like Rancher and k3s you can make it even simpler.
I would argue that Kubernetes has _nothing whatsoever_ to do with the spirit of the Cloud, and that in fact "serverless" embodies the spirit of pay-as-you-use consumption models.
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2016/07/autoscaling-in-kubernetes...
Although, managed kubernetes clusters let you auto-scale the cluster itself, so i think the GP is wrong.
This tool allows you to autoscale the cluster itself with various cloud providers. There is a list of cloud providers it supports at the end of the readme.
Long term, but up front costs are what make cloud services appealing.
FWIW, it's possible to minimize your idle VM costs to an extent. For example, you could use one or more autoscale groups for your cluster and keep them scaled to one vm each. Then use tools like cluster auto scaler to resize on demand as your workload grows. You are correct that idle vm costs can't be completely avoided. At least not as far as I am aware.
> Long term, but up front costs are what make cloud services appealing.
There are no up front costs. GP said rent dedicated, not buy your own metal. If there's anything in cloud it's the many pre-written services (queue, database etc) but GP is right: if you go k8s you aren't going to use many/at all so why not just go and rent cheap servers that get deployed in two minutes instead of renting expesive virtual servers which get deployed in a few seconds?
"Frankly, it’s been tough to convince the largest enterprises that a public grid represents an attractive future. Just as I’m sure George Westinghouse was confounded by the Chief Electricity Officers of the time that resisted buying power from a grid, rather than building their own internal utilities."
https://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/2006/03/20/the-netwo...
But as of where we are now, it is a good abstraction to get there. It provides a lot of stuff like service discovery, auto-scaling and redundancy. Yes you do need to have instances to run K8s, but that is as of date the only abstraction that we have on all cloud providers, local virtualization, and bare metal. So yes it isn't true on demand "cloud" but in order to work like that you need to fit into your service provider's framework and accept limitations on container size, runtime, deal with warm up times occasionally.
The issue was mainly with the admins not provisioning enough capacity, but for us devs it was fucking magical.
In light of this statement, what do you make of the fact that billions of dollars are spent on EC2? And of the people who spend that money?
Today Kubernetes is the antithesis of the cloud - Instead of consuming resources on demand you're launching VMs that need to run 24/7 and have specific roles and names like "master-1". Might as well rent bare-metal servers. It will cost you less.