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Comment by pstadler | Hacker News Reader

> Do you want to do all of this because you think is fun? Or because you want to learn the technology? or just because? Please, be my guest! [...]

Kubernetes is likely here to stay. If you're interested in running a cluster to undestand what the hype is all about and to learn something new, you should do it. Also, ignore everybody telling you that this platform wasn't meant for that.

Complexity is a weak argument. Once your cluster is running you just write a couple of manifests to deploy a project, versus: ssh into machine; useradd; mkdir; git clone; add virtual host to nginx; remember how certbot works; apt install whatever; systemctl enable whatever; pm2 start whatever.yml; auto-start project on reboot; configure logrotate; etc. Can this be automated? Sure, but I'd rather automate my cluster provisioning.

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I will also invite everyone to try it and I also believe K8S is here to stay. I think K8S makes a lot of sense for lots of workloads, but I don't think it makes sense to maintain a k8s cluster to run personal projects.

About complexity, what you're saying is true, but I think "once your cluster is running" is making a lot of assumptions about what is actually running in the cluster in terms of infra and what workloads you can run there.

> About complexity, what you're saying is true, but I think "once your cluster is running" is making a lot of assumptions about what is actually running in the cluster in terms of infra and what workloads you can run there.

Already answered in a way:

> Can this be automated? Sure, but I'd rather automate my cluster provisioning.

If I need more computational power or a specific 3rd-party service that I don't have available at this point, I simply tear down my current cluster and deploy it elsewhere.

I agree with you, I think K8s is great to learn so you know what it can do, but I wouldn't use it for personal projects. For that, I recommend something like Dokku, which is very easy to get started with.

For Kubernetes, I found the docs a bit bad, the starting concepts are very easy to grok but the docs obfuscate them. I wrote a very short article on the basics [0], for anyone who might be interested in learning. After reading the article, reading the docs should be much easier, as you'll know the terms much more intuitively.

[0]: https://www.stavros.io/posts/kubernetes-101/

> Complexity is a weak argument

I see you've never tried to upgrade a running kubernetes cluster or been in an on call schedule for one. It's a new technology that is still maturing but it has a lot of moving parts all of which require a fair bit of understanding and which change on a regular basis.

Hell, just a few months ago the ACM agent totally got rewritten and now you have a choice between alpha software or a deprecated project!

I treat my cluster as immutable. My setup is open source: https://github.com/hobby-kube/guide

> just write a couple of manifests to deploy a project, versus...

Whenever anyone says "just do something" these days, it usually means that it hasn't been thought through properly. Is that only my personal experience?

No, I have the same reaction, too. Especially when it's nestled in to a paragraph that, essentially, starts off by highlighting that something is an example of essential complexity.

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