Kubernetes is NOT a container orchestrator | Hacker News Reader

Kubernetes is NOT a container orchestrator

flanksource.com

18 pointsmoshloop16 comments

Click bait title. The point of this article is that Kubernetes is indeed an orchestrator, but "so much more". However, it's mostly a bunch of random conversational pieces, like mentioning the slack channel has 90k users

The size of the slack channel alludes to the size of the eco-system, and the scale at which Kubernetes is solving not just technical coding problems, but non-technical communication problems

How about "Kubernetes as a complexity generator"? :-)

Kubernetes isn't the source of complexity - it is the problem domain of building and operating distributed systems that are fundamentally and essentially complex.

Compare the complexity of Kubernetes to Openstack - the next most similar project in the same problem space, and you will find Kubernetes is actually pretty simple.

OpenStack and Kubernetes serve different purposes. Despite the article, Kubernetes at its core really is a container orchestrator. OpenStack is a collection of software you'd use for running a mini-AWS on bare metal infrastructure.

OpenStack and Kubernetes don't serve different purposes - they just solve them differently.

Both fundamentally are about abstracting the way in which infrastructure is managed.

Well you can't run OpenStack on Kubernetes, but the other way round works. They target infrastructure at different levels of abstraction

I think you meant OpenShift. OpenStack works with full fledge VMs not containers.

I meant OpenStack.

Kubernetes works with fully-fledged VM's as well - See Kubevirt

My question is then what counts as a container orchestrator. Not to shit on the article but why over-complicate the definition of an already over-engineered system

You can solve container orchestration problems using Kubernetes, but you can also solve them using Swarm, Nomad and Mesos.

Kubernetes is the most popular, precisely because it is not over-engineered, the level of engineering matches the problem domain.

Is there even a viable alternative to Kubernetes at this point? For that matter, is there an alternative to YAML for defining Kubernetes setups?

I find that nomad is actually a very good alternative.

Sure, https://github.com/Azure/draft doesn't require any YAML and deploys onto Kubernetes.

I remember someone also doing a demo of configuring your kubernetes deployment on your Java objects directly.

I believe there are a few viable k8s alternatives depending on your requirements. We use Jsonnet currently, but CUElang looks neat as well.

OpenShift of course. And no, there are no alternatives AFAIK for the setups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com