What we learned after a year on Kubernetes

Re:What we learned after a year on Kubernetes by Traubenfuchs on Thursday September 17, 2020 @03:54AM (#24502172)

My disappointment with Kubernetes as the next/current big thing is that it practically didn't change a thing for companies as a whole. You still need dedicated devops people / a dedicated team. There is so much to get wrong regarding security, reliability and performance. Most application developers stay away from k8 configuration and could not quickly replace a devops engineer. They are the wizards holding the power.

It's an incredible mess of artificial complexity. You finally understood kubernetes and can work with the manifest files? Oh, no, no, no, nobody does that. You need to at least learn helm and a dozen of other kubernetes ecosystem tools! Every company has a different setup for it.

* I have a GKE cluster running to learn Kubernetes. Once you understood the basics it's indeed a simple way to get applications up and running, but my points stand. I am far away from enterprise readiness.

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Re:What we learned after a year on Kubernetes by etripe on Thursday September 17, 2020 @05:43AM (#24502742)

I agree. Through being complex, it stimulates management to turn devops into a separate pillar in the organisation, creating "devops" akin to "Agile".

The practical results for me were:

* Having to write a CLI app to reduce the time wasted and spit out simple config templates for our actual (very much not Google-scale) use case

* Whenever something didn't work, throw it over the wall and hope the DevOps gods deemed us worthy

I like tools that have sensible defaults and try to stay out of your way. K8s fails on both counts in my experience.

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Re:What we learned after a year on Kubernetes by skytreader on Thursday September 17, 2020 @04:26AM (#24502335)

My experience is the same with the caveat that it made life somewhat easier for the devops team (of course, I was in the devops team here). All the common devops tasks were much easier (scaling, health checks, etc). Unfortunately, the least common ones were harder and lacked documentation to boot at least at first, until we got our own documentation to refer to.

To add to that, I think there's a very specific way you must do things to get K8s "right" and reap benefits. Or maybe it's a question of scale. There were honestly times when I thought maybe we could've stuck with good old servers. When I left the team was trying to redo microservices---this time properly---by introducing event queues and pubsub and finally split that database.

Love that workplace but I'm honestly glad I didn't get to participate in that transition. Sounds like "artificial complexity" as you put it. Would love to hear if they pulled it off though or not, a project postmortem basically.

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Re:What we learned after a year on Kubernetes by kkapelon on Thursday September 17, 2020 @08:31AM (#24503788)

>You still need dedicated devops people / a dedicated team.

Why is this surprising? You always need people to manage stuff. Was there any point where Kubernetes was advertised as a way to NOT have sys admins/devops?

Don't even get me started on "serverless"....

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