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Comment by mhluongo | Hacker News Reader

Hoping this helps with the Kubernetes learning curve. We've just started migrating and keeping track of the terminology has been tough.

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This tool kompose helped me when I did my first POC on kubernetes since it allowed me to get up and running with something without having to study all the new abstractions and terminology in kubernetes, but pretty quickly I ended up going back over the generated yml files line by line and manually changing stuff. Overall still a helpful tool since many people use Compose in development but need to eventually migrate to kubernetes for production.

I'm really happy to hear that it helped you get started with Kubernetes. This was one of the reasons we started with the project.

(I'm one of the Kompose maintainers. ;-) )

Is there a reason to go from docker-compose to kubernetes?

We've been using docker-compose for dev but still used eg Salt and hand written deploys for production. We basically used docker parity between dev machines, and are now taking it into production

Kubernetes is a more robust tool and has a great community around it. For example https://github.com/kubernetes/charts. You can launch any of these applications in one line

https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/incubator

and then very easily tweak them.

The typical use case is when a dev team uses docker compose while the ops team has chosen docker+kube. It creates an impedance mismatch which complicates the dev/ops handoff.

Since it's typically hard for the ops team to convince the dev team to abandon compose, the next best thing for is to translate formats each time the dev team wants to deploy. That is what kompose allows.

Note that Docker has a similar translator built-in, so ops teams can deploy compose to production directly without needing an external tool. But it doesn't support kubernetes, so it doesn't help ops teams who have adopted kube.

agreed, it's surprisingly hard to get your head around initially. minikube helps me personally.

I work on a team who wants to help make this easier. What are the concepts that you think are the most complex?

For me, it's mostly the number of concepts and the fact that they need to be known upfront. None of them are particularly difficult, but I've done ops for a bit and gone from manual sysadmin on bare metal to Puppet to Chef to Salt... then when we started playing with docker, there's the initial learning curve, then a slew of orchestration options to consider. I'm exhausted keeping up with devops tools.

What I want is a better way to learn hands-on or as I go. Not sure exactly what that looks like.

Nothing reminds you how little you actually know when you have to pick up docker/k8s for the first time, and realize that it's a long journey to understand every nuance you need to get things done.

Started using minikube and kompose just yesterday. They're really nice tools. I'm stuck on the fact that minikube doesn't seem to use my vpn connection (fail when attempting to link to library dependencies over vpn).

That sounds annoying. Could it be something with the configuration in your virtualization tool?

Could be, I'm using xhyve, but haven't messesd with any configuration myself.

You can install Docker for Mac, which supports VPN integration out of the box, then install kubernetes on top of that. I heard it works great.

https://docker.com/mac

Yes, I've been using Docker for Mac since beta and it does indeed work fine with VPN. It's when I'm using Docker inside minikube where it fails. I didn't realize installing k8 and using with Docker for Mac was straightforward, I'll give it a try. Btw, thx for such an incredible tool!

I actually just wrote an article that talks about all these complexities, and how micro-PaaS (things like hyper.sh, dokku, and nanobox.io) address a lot of them.

https://hackernoon.com/what-is-micro-paas-and-why-its-the-fu...

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