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Comment by justinsb | Hacker News Reader

Please note that this guide is _only_ for learning purposes - it makes a lot of decisions that do not follow the recommended production approach. If you're installing for production purposes, you should use one of the existing tools if you can (I work on kops and so naturally recommend it for AWS). If none of the tools meet your needs, you should probably first open issues on those tools; if you still must write your own installation method, you should combine this guide with the official documentation to understand a cluster as created by one of the recommended tools, before building your own.

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Happy to improve the tutorial to incorporate the production approach that should be taken for each task. The main goal is allow people to run through a cluster bootstrap step by step so they learn how things work.

If you don't mind filing a few issues on the project I'll be happy to rework each lab to start addressing these concerns. Until then I've added a note to the README regarding production readiness, but that should not prevent people from learning.

You should participate in sig-cluster-lifecycle. The conclusion of that sig (or my interpretation of it) was that having a production suitable cluster is - today - essentially orthogonal to having a discoverable build-your own cluster. So we are all best served by having this document for those that want to learn about how kubernetes works, but a separate approach for installing a production cluster that prioritizes correctness over obviousness. I think what you are doing is great, but I worry that using words like "support" imply that you will be offering some support for people that try to run this in production.

However, the long term goal of sig-cluster-lifecycle is to bridge the gap here, to make a production configuration easy and obvious. So I'd love to see you start using the new kubeadm work, for example, so that we can meet in the middle!

Thanks for the feedback. My goal is to augment those tools with step-by-step documentation so people get an opportunity to learn how things work. Yes, I will attempt to "support" people as they attempt to learn things the hard way.

I would also like to note that I'm not in competition with those automation tools. I'm just really focused on helping people learn. Some parts of the Kubernetes community really want to learn this stuff without an automation tool so they can skill up to build their own, custom, tools that match their preferences and tradeoffs.

That's wonderful - I think what you're doing is super important - everyone wants configuration to be easy enough that the automation tools are a comparable effort to doing things yourself! Helping people that go the kubernetes-from-scratch route has proven really difficult in the past, hence the focus on making things easier before encouraging manual installation, but I'll start sending people your way :-)

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