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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

>>> The value of containerizing your application is clear and has been realized over and over again. The jury is still out on k8s.

The value of containerizing applications is negligible if there isn't the orchestration to go with it.

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Not really, the value of containers that most people have seen is that it's just a more portable package. It's easier to move between environments in a consistent way. If I do that with fancy orchestration, shell scripts, or configuration management largely doesn't matter. I can get most of the advantages with shell scripts.

Deploying containers is shell-script-easy as long as nothing goes wrong. Ever. I know you know this. I'm a little confused why you'd make a claim like this.

It's really true for most users. I've seen it over and over again. Working in SV we lose sight of just how simple many peoples applications are. But I'm not saying just start a server and call it good. Use auto scaling groups, and some monitoring from your cloud provider. It's typically sufficient. Some of the most successful container deployments I've seen just use terraform + AWS services (EBS, ELB, ASGs). Its simple and gets the job done, not a lot of moving parts.

Auto scaling groups and ELB are world class orchestration. I can understand that you take it for granted if you already got that.

Containers are mostly useless without orchestration. A fancy zip file that can't distribute itself.

Outside of SV, the fight has never been to package applications, but to find some available servers where it can run and run it.

As someone who has worked in an environment where thousands of machines were being deployed to, this is ridiculous. Orchestration is an area where good tooling makes an absolutely massive difference. Shell scripts are not a good tool for observability or handling rollbacks.

I didn't say orchestration provides no value. I've spent the last 15 years building orchestration systems, I believe in them. I'm merely saying the most value of containers is achieved without requiring the adoption of orchestration. What I mean by that is if you take your existing means of running non-containerized apps, and change nothing except putting your app in a container, you will see a large benefit. Now changing your existing means of deploying application and swapping that out to an orchestration engine such as k8s may or may not benefit you. If you have 1000 servers, you will mostly likely see benefit. If you have 20, you might not.

k8s or orchestration/clustering is not the only way to run containers. Amazon knows that. If I was to make a bet I say that Fargate or Lambda have much better chance of being a major money maker for AWS.

Most environments (99.99%) don’t have thousands, hundreds, or frankly even dozens of machines to deploy to.

You're on hacker news, where technologists who run world class infrastructure congregate.

The average number of servers per people who commented this news is over one thousand.

So they say. No one wants to back up a comment with "...and I run twelve machines". Could still be 'world class' tho.

I seriously doubt that. 1000+ servers is a lot. The number of organisations worldwide running that many servers in any sort of coordination must be pretty low. Services (or "pods") sure, but actual servers? Can't be more than a few hundred companies, surely.

One would also think that by 1000-ish servers it's starting to make a lot of financial sense to move out of AWS anyway.

Amusingly, since there are only 200 comments, his statement is true simply by the luck of saying average: multiple companies that comment here are in the tens to hundreds of thousands plus servers range, bringing up the average for everyone :). That said, I'd be deeply surprised if the median was breaking 100. 100 dual-socket servers gets you a lot of compute these days!

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