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Comment by alexdrans | Hacker News Reader

If you had just convinced your CEO you need to hire a contractor to implement k8s on EC2 for your startup, what would you do now?

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Having done multiple K8s migrations, I can tell you that many of the problems around migrating to k8s have little to do with actually setting up the cluster. There's dockerizing all your apps, setting up the build->deploy pipeline for each app, and fixing all the hardcoded hacks where your apps aren't properly 12-factor (failing to take config from env vars, assuming you "always" deploy to a specific cloud, etc).

The other main component of my time in a k8s engagement revolves around logging, monitoring, alerting and backups of the k8s cluster, which hopefully EKS handles for you.

All told, actually starting the k8s cluster is probably less than 10% of my time.

> All told, actually starting k8s cluster is probably less than 10% of my time.

+1.

I've found myself (with Azure ACS) re-creating clusters quite often - as they don't support upgrades. This takes minutes with my deploy scripts, replicating the state of the cluster you're copying is the main bit of work.

I agree with this but I think the responsibility for fixing all this stuff lies with the teams responsible for each app - they should be the ones dockerising apps, setting up monitoring etc - that way you're distributing the devops stuff around the team which is what you really want.

Already running on ECS, so sounds like k8s will be a breeze!

Keep going... EKS is still in preview, so you probably shouldn't rely on it in production just yet. However you could check out kops (https://github.com/kubernetes/kops), which makes provisioning a k8s cluster on AWS extremely easy. Good luck! :)

I'd highly, highly recommend using kube-aws over kops for AWS. Its far more transparent as it uses CloudFormation templates, though it does have a higher upfront time investment. Probably two hours as opposed to the 30 minutes or so that kops requires.

Kops can emit terraform, FYI.

That's how we've been migrating from our existing terraform-based infra to kubernetes. It made the transition of our staging environment relatively painless.

Good to know, thanks.

It depends on your deadlines. In the short-term, I would keep course and target a possible simplification in the automation code in the near future.

EKS is still in preview and it doesn't seem like CloudFormation or Terraform support it yet.

EKS is likely to be in preview/beta for most if not all of next year. Even after it exits preview, you'd probably want someone else to kick the production tires. Given how Kube on EC2 is doable/manageable (that's what we do) I don't see a reason to stop. If Kube is the right choice for you now, it's the right choice on EC2, and once EKS becomes a thing you can migrate to, you can just do it.

That is fine! Depending on your deadlines you can either go ahead and implement a small scale kubernetes cluster on EC2 then when EKS is ready, you can easily migrate your workloads to it which is essentially the benefit of using kubernetes in the first place.

Whether you're spawning your own cluster or using AKS, you still need to setup a build pipeline and have your applications be in a containerizable state. And any configuration like Dockerfiles or Helm charts you can still use. Actually setting the cluster up isn't the big deal (with something like Kops, at least.)

Double your budget.

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