Re:De-cloud and de-K8s – Bringing our apps back home
by jameshart on Wednesday March 22, 2023 @09:44PM
(#35269497)
I think people overindex on thinking that Kubernetes is about scalability.
Honestly, its inbuilt horizontal scaling systems are pretty lacking. Scaling is not actually K8s's strong suit - sure, you can make it scale, but that takes effort and customization.
But what K8s, at base, is actually useful for is availability.
You tell K8s how many instances of a thing to run; it runs them; if any of them stop running, it detects that and tries to fix it.
When you want to deploy a new version, it replaces the old instances with new ones, while ensuring traffic still gets served.
And it does all of this over a substrate of shared underlying server nodes, in such a way that if any of those servers goes down, it will redistribute workloads to compensate.
All of that is useful even if you don't care about scale.
Honestly, its inbuilt horizontal scaling systems are pretty lacking. Scaling is not actually K8s's strong suit - sure, you can make it scale, but that takes effort and customization.
But what K8s, at base, is actually useful for is availability.
You tell K8s how many instances of a thing to run; it runs them; if any of them stop running, it detects that and tries to fix it.
When you want to deploy a new version, it replaces the old instances with new ones, while ensuring traffic still gets served.
And it does all of this over a substrate of shared underlying server nodes, in such a way that if any of those servers goes down, it will redistribute workloads to compensate.
All of that is useful even if you don't care about scale.