But I'm not sure one can find something of "the right power" that has the same support from cloud providers, the open source community, the critical mass, etc. [1]
Eventually, a standard "simplified" abstraction over k8s will emerge. Many already exist, but they're all over the place. And some are vendor specific (Google Cloud Run is basically just running k8s for you). Then if you need the power, you can eject. Something like Create React App, but by Kubernetes. Create Kubernetes App.
[1] Though Nomad looks promising.
I come from the opposite approach. I have 4 servers two digital ocean $5 and two vulr $2.50 instances. One holds the db. One server as the frontend/code. One server to do heavy work and another to server a heavy site and holds backups. For $15 I'm hosting hundreds of sites, running so many background processes. I couldn't imagine hitting that point where k8s would make sense just for myself unless for fun.
If you do, the recipe is to reduce the number of components, get the most reliable components you can find, and make the single points of failure redundant.
Saying you can use Kubernetes to turn whatever stupid crap people tend to deploy with it highly available, is like saying you can make an airliner reliable by installing some sort of super fancy electronic box inside. You don't get more reliability by adding more components.
This is a bit funny, considering Airbus jets use triple-redundancy and a voting system for some of their critical components. [1]
[1] https://criticaluncertainties.com/2009/06/20/airbus-voting-l...
Are you ok with your application going down for each upgrade? With Kubernetes, it's very simple to configure a deployment so that downtime doesn't happen.
On the other hand, atomic upgrades by stopping the old service and then starting the new service on a Linux command line (/Gitlab runner) can be done in 10 seconds (depending on the service of course – dynamic languages/frameworks sometimes are disadvantaged here). I doubt many customers will notice 10 second downtimes.
K8s only makes sense at near Google-scale, where you have a team dedicated to managing that infrastructure layer (on top of the folks managing the rest of the infrastructure). For almost everyone else, it's damaging to use it and introduces so much risk. Either your team learns k8s inside out (so a big chunk of their work becomes about managing k8s) or they cross their fingers and trust the black box (and when it fails, panic).
The most effective teams I've worked on have been the ones where the software engineers understand each layer of the stack (even if they have specialist areas of focus). That's not possible at FAANG scale, which is why the k8s abstraction makes sense there.
You could run init container with Kaniko that pushes image to repo and then main container that pulls that back but for that you need to do kubectl rollout restart deploy <name>
If you are looking for pure CI/CD gitlab has awesome support or you could do Tekton or Argo. They can run on the same cluster.
Besides, it's additional hassle and a chance for things to go wrong, the way I have it set up now is that production gets a new deployment whenever something gets pushed to master and I don't have to do anything else.
A text file with some setup notes is enough for simple needs, or something like Ansible if its more complex. A lot of web apps aren't much more than some files, a database, and maybe a config file or three (all of which should be versioned and backed up).
I don't hate it but if you need to login to a server regularly because you need to do an apt upgrade, you should have enabled automatic security updates and not login every few days.
If your server runs full because of some logfiles or stuff, you should fix the underlying issue and not needing to login to a server.
You should trust your machines, independently if it is only one machine, 2, 3 or 100. You wanna be able to go on holiday and know your systems are stable, secure and doing their job.
And logging in also implies a snow flake. Doesn't matter as long as that machine runs and as long as you have not that many changes but k8s actually makes it very simple to finally have an abstraction layer for infrastructure.
Flux - https://github.com/fluxcd/flux
ArgoCD - https://argoproj.github.io/argo-cd/
The service just runs a script that uses netcat to listen on a special port that I also configured GitHub to send webhooks to, and processes the hook/deploys if appropriate.
Then when it's done, systemd restarts the script (it is set to always restart) and we're locked and loaded again. It's about 15 lines of shell script in total.
Deploying as distribution package tends to not work well when you want to deploy it more than once on a specific server (which quickly leads us to classic end-result of that approach, which is VM per deployment minimum - been there, done that, still have scars).
Management of cron jobs was a shitshow, is a shitshow, and probably will be a shitshow except for those that run their crons using non-cron tools (which includes k8s).
How much of K8s is just an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Erlang.
I totally agree. I would dearly like something simpler than Kubernetes. But there isnt a managed Nomad service, and apparently nothing in between Dokku and managed Kubernetes either.
The test is going from zero to production traffic in a new cloud region.