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Comment by shruubi | Hacker News Reader

This article concerns me, especially considering the first thing you see is "There is no such thing as Kubernetes LTS (and that’s fantastic)".

What is so great about running your infrastructure on a platform that has no intention of ensuring long-term stability? Irregardless of how well backward-compatibility is maintained, the idea that we should all move our infrastructure to something that lacks the fundamental promise of "updating won't break everything" seems downright irresponsible.

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LTS releases aren't really about stability or upgradability; in practice I think they're more often used as an excuse to never upgrade because the risk of applying 2-5 years of changes at once is too high. It sounds like k8s is trying to nudge people into a more continuous deployment model.

The last thing I want from an external supplier of something I depend on is to have them driving my development and release cycle. I'll expend the resources to upgrade to your latest version when it's worth my time and cost.

Edit: I'm speaking to the vendor here, not you, of course...

And you can indeed just sit around on an older version. The vendor in this case just won't bother doing stuff to help you.

> What is so great about running your infrastructure on a platform that has no intention of ensuring long-term stability?

Kubernetes uses API versioning and takes backward compatibility very seriously for stable APIs.

Regarding LTS, these discussions are happening and increasing in number as time passes. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXBjA2hH-CQ

That's a really important review that is not showing up in the rest of this lengthy discussion.

The only way frequent upgrades are possibly sane is if you take backwards compat very very very seriously, and succeed at doing so. If users of k8 think it's doing that, that's important info.

(I think many of us are lately getting burned by a lot of open source software that _doesn't_ succeed very well at backwards compat (whether they're trying or not, sometimes it's not clear), _and_ expects you to upgrade all the time).

Author here. The point is that the stable APIs are rock solid, the design of its API versioning and the community's pace of delivery is a huge part of why it's all maturing so quickly.

That's all well and good until it isn't anymore. And to top it off, your recommendation is to either hire someone to manage k8s full-time or be at the mercy of your cloud vendor and hope that one day you don't turn up to work to find that the new update you weren't aware was being rolled out has just broken everything.

You can't ask a large-scale company to take a dice-roll on k8s for their infrastructure when the only promise of long-term reliability is "trust us not to make any breaking changes".

I think you should have leaned on that point harder and more explicitly for the readers that were not already k8 users. :)

Just trying to keep up with the shifting sands of web programming is a headache in itself. And now we have people wanting to build our whole infrastructure on yet more shifting sand. Argh.

No LTS is fantastic -- as long as you don't expect me to put it in production. ;)

k8s is a tale of woeful, hilarious levels of platform immaturity jammed down the public's throat by the Google PR machine. I believe Kubernetes is a centerpiece in Google's cloud play against Amazon (I don't think it will be successful), and that this consideration drives a lot of the particular weirdness and distortion that exists around it.

It'd be a whole different ball game if they discouraged production use and told people "We can't even commit to keeping this up to date for one single year, whereas all other enterprise vendors offer 5 years or more, you'd be silly to think this was ready for prime time." But they don't, because then you don't have starry-eyed brogrammers saying "DUDE, we gotta get on k8s so we can be like my homies in Mountain View, aw man, it's so awesome! It says Google Cloud is the best way to get Kubernetes, call 'em up!"

I feel sorry for anyone who was naive enough to say "Well, if Google does it, so do I!" and jumped headfirst into this bear trap, making themselves collateral damage in a pissing contest between two megacorps.

Source: I work with people who decided to move our entire infrastructure to Kubernetes. We have now run virtually everything on k8s for over a year. I'd feel sorry for them, but they left the company some time later, so now I just feel sorry for me. :)

>"There is no such thing as Kubernetes LTS (and that’s fantastic)"

OpenShift?

Technically OpenShift isn’t LTS yet, it’s 1 year and 3 year (the latter is special extended support). Right now we’re planning on 1.9 being our first LTS with the longer support commitment (3yr?). Still being sorted out.

We won’t be doing the 10 year support like for RHEL 4/5/6 yet.

As a guy who likes the stability traditional vendors provide as apposed to the madness that is chasing hip upstream developers, the mere fact that your working on providing LTS guarantees gives you a significant advantage over your competitors.

Looking forward to what Openshift will bring to the table!

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