Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefe78 | Hacker News Reader

As a systems engineer, I struggle with this virtually every day. We're called 'DevOps' by most and anytime we encounter a new problem, everyone invariably screams for containers. Containers aren't a magic bullet.

My favourite example is when our AWS TAMs offer a solution, knowing we have ZERO pipeline/infrastructure setup for supporting containers. They always push containers. We don't use containers, stop forcing them down our throat. We've tried, we've been burned, VMs work for us. Stop!

When did containers become perceived as the end-all solution? I see their value and uses but they don't meet ours so why have we started ignoring the right solution for the job? I see this everywhere I go.

View on HN

You need containers to run on Kubernetes my dude. And running on Kubernetes is critical.

Reminds me of this: http://www.mongodb-is-web-scale.com/

"Docker, docker, docker!"

Edit: I'm not knocking either of these products - I actively use Mongodb in production. I like docker/containers/Kubernetes and have used them for various projects. I just take offence with how people have started ignoring common sense, like: we don't have the tooling in place to support this product, or: it doesn't meet our business needs.

I think orchestration is critical. Kubernetes has obviously "won", but we're getting alot of wins from running on ECS that we'd have to rollback and reimplement on K8S, at least until EKS becomes available.

(honestly couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic, so assumed you weren't)

If you aren't currently struggling to manage a large pool of servers / services, then you don't need Kubernetes. Not yet, at least. It's over-complicated overkill if you don't need it yet. So are containers, actually, but the bar is a lot lower for them.

Yes I know you were being sarcastic.

But you don't need k8s or containers for orchestration.

I chose Hashicorp's Nomad (I'm the dev lead for our company) precisely because I didn't want to commit to Docker from day one but I did want to leave that option open. Nomad works with everything - Docker containers, jar files, shell scripts, raw executables, etc and is dead simple to set up - one < 20Mb self contained executable that works as a client, server and as a member of a cluster. Configuration is dead simple if you use Consul.

Rants like this are commonplace at my "devops" team as well. Docker is being pushed down everyone's throats and next up is Kubernetes.

It could be worse-- Your AWS TAMs could be pushing Lambda functions

Reply on news.ycombinator.com