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Comment by 20yrs_no_equity | Hacker News Reader

Kubernetes seems very unwieldy and hard to wrap my head around. Swarm seems straightforward and easy to figure out how to configure.

Let's give it a try and see if I can find a good tutorial for kubernetes to do what I want. (I haven't tried this experiment in a couple months, since before nomad and swarm got my interest.)

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Ok, I'm back. I went to kubernetes.io. there' "give it a try" has me creating a google account and getting set up on google container engine. Due to standard issue google account hassles, I quickly got mired in quicksand having nothing to do with kubernetes.

I have no interest in google container engine. Let me set it up using vagrant, or my own VPSes, or as a demo locally, whatever, I'll set up virtual boxes.

They lost me there.

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Check out minikube: github.com/kubernetes/minikube

It's a local setup to let you give Kubernetes a try. We haven't made it the default in the "give it a try" dialog yet, but we're considering it.

Disclosure: I'm an engineer at Google and I work on Minikube.

I found the Minikube getting started to be a good experience about a month ago. If you did make Minikube the default for "give it a try" that would instantly gain k8s more credibility in my eyes, as it calls attention to the excellent tooling around k8s, diminishes the perception of GKE as the only first-class k8s environment (ahem, lock-in!), and promotes the notion of an economical and fast k8s development environment.

It isn't directly linked from the front page, but they have a getting started section [0] that covers non-GKE options. I run k8s on AWS using the Kops tool.

Kubernetes is definitely more to learn before getting started than swarm, but that's mostly because it has different and more powerful primitives and more features built in.

[0]: http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/

What are standard Google account hassles? The k8s getting started guide is one of the single best cloud setup guides I've ever read. You've deployed your app, and can easily leverage the concepts listed their to deploy more complex apps.

K8s might seem more unwieldy than swarm, but from that feature set you can expect things to work the way they are explained.

Swarm on the other hand has made my entire team question whether 1.12 is even worth upgrading to.

Completely 100% disagree that the getting started guide is easy. Let's go through this by the numbers. First off specifically comparing the guides, the Docker 1.12 stuff works ANYWHERE you have root access. When I go here I'm totally confused:

http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/

Ok, let's see, not only do I immediately get diverted to another page, but I feel like every OS+Cloud combination isn't represented. I guess the CLOSEST thing to working is Ubuntu+AWS. Click.

http://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/juju/

YAY! JUJU a new technology I need to learn. Hey guess what, this only works with Ubuntu. Closes browser. I spent weeks trying to map this out in my head. I can't understand why Kub doesn't just "install" like Docker does.

Ok, back to the deployment guide. Let's see there's a GIANT TABLE OF LINKS based on cloud+OS+whatever. So I think it's a massive understatement to say that Kub is more unwieldy than Swarm 1.12.

The docs are more of an encyclopedia: a lot of facts, not a lot of editorializing. Unless you enjoy learning from encyclopedias, I would highly recommend talking to other members of the community on the kubernetes slack (kubernetes-novice, kubernetes-user or for AWS sig-aws). That way you can quickly find what has worked well for people and what hasn't, and hopefully save yourself a ton of time.

I would love for our docs to be better - good people are working on it though documentation is always hard. In the meantime, the community is a wonderful resource!

The thing is, the docker stuff might be simple, but it doesn't actually work. Or at least the networking portion doesn't work as advertised.

http://kubernetes.io/docs/hellonode/ Is the guide that I was taking about. From your post it was not clear that you weren't using gce.

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