Comment by nrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nrb | Hacker News Reader

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It's an afternoon worth of research to understand the basic concepts. Then, with the powerful and intuitive tooling you can spin up your own cluster on your computer in minutes and practice deploying containers that:

- are automatically assigned to an appropriate machine(node) based on explicit resource limits you define, enabling reliable performance

- horizontally scale (even automatically if you want!)

- can be deployed with a rolling update strategy to preserve uptime during deployments

- can rollback with swiftness and ease

- have liveness checks that restart unhealthy apps(pods) automatically and prevent bad deploys from being widely released

- abstracts away your infrastructure, allowing these exact same configs to power a cluster on-prem, in the cloud on bare metal or vms, with a hosted k8s service, or some combination of all of them

All of that functionality is unlocked with just a few lines of config or kubectl command, and there are tools that abstract this stuff to simplify it even more or automate more of it.

You definitely want some experienced people around to avoid some of the footguns and shortcuts but over the last several years I think k8s has easily proven itself as a substantial net-positive for many shops.

So why should I do all of that instead of throwing a little money at AWS, run ECS and actually spend my time creating my product?

Heck, if my needs are simple enough why should I even use ECS instead of just putting my web app on some VM's in an auto-scaling group behind a load balancer and used managed services?

Hate to tell you this but that second idea is much easier to manage from an operations standpoint and significantly more reliable.

Also easier to debug and monitor... but you run your business to make developers happy right ?

I think that was his point (you are referring to using VMs, right?)

Having worked with ECS 2.0 when Fargate was released, the setup was much harder to use from operations standpoint the moment you needed anything more complex (not to mention any kind of state) than k8s. Just getting monitoring out of AWS was annoyance involving writing lambda functions to ship logs...

Fargate has built in logging and monitoring via CloudWatch. It redirects console output to CloudWatch logs.

And I'll be blunt that CloudWatch, especially logs, aren't all that hot in actual use. It might have gotten better, but all places I worked for last two years if they used AWS they depended on their own log aggregation, even if using AWS-provided Elastic Search.

There are other supported options.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/fargate-container-lo...

CloudWatch sucks. Sorry.

I don't think anyone is arguing that you should use k8s for a simple web app. There's definitely some inherent stack complexity threshold before solutions like k8s/mesos/nomad are warranted.

When you start having several services that need to fail and scale independently, some amount of job scheduling, request routing... You're going to appreciate the frameworks put in place.

My best advice is to containerize everything from the start, and then you can start barebones and start looking at orchestration systems when you actually have a need for it.

What requirement is driving containers ?

How are you managing your infrastructure and if you have that already automated how much effort is it to add the software you develop to that automation vs the ROI of adding another layer of complexity ?

The idea everything needs to be in containers is similar to the idea everything needs to be in k8s.

Let the business needs drive the technology choices don't drive the business with the technology choices

Portability - the idea being that you can migrate to an orchestration technology that makes sense when you have the need. The cost and effort of containerizing any single service from the get-go should be minimal. It also helps a lot with reproducibility, local testing, tests in CI, etc.

Valid reasons to not run containerized in production can be specific security restrictions or performance requirements. I could line up several things that are not suitable for containers, but if you're in a position of "simple but growing web app that doesn't really warrant kubernetes right now" (the comment I was replying to), I think it's good rule of thumb.

I agree with your main argument, of course.

The overhead managing a container ecosystem to run production is not trivial. IF you are doing this in a service then by all means leverage that package methodology.

If you are managing your systems who already have a robust package management layer then adding the container stacks on top of managing the OS layers you have just doubled the systems your operations team is managing.

Containers also bring NAT and all sorts of DNS / DHCP issues that require extremely senior well rounded guys to manage.

Developers dont see this complexity and think containers are great.

Effectively containers moves the complexity of managing source code into infrastructure where you have to manage that complexity.

The tools to manage source code are mature. The tools to manage complex infrastructure are not mature and the people with the skills required to do so ... are rare.

> If you are managing your systems who already have a robust package management layer then adding the container stacks on top of managing the OS layers you have just doubled the systems your operations team is managing.

Oh yeah, if you're not building the software in-house it's a lot less clear that "Containerizate Everything!" is the answer every time. Though there are stable helm charts for a lot of the commonly used software out there, do whatever works for you, man ;)

> Containers also bring NAT and all sorts of DNS / DHCP issues that require extremely senior well rounded guys to manage.

I mean, at that point you can just run with host mode networking and it's all the same, no?

Or you can just use ECS/Fargate and each container registers itself to Route53 and you can just use DNS...

Out of all of the business concerns that a startup or basically any company has, “cloud lock in” is at the bottom of the list.

Creating the infrastructure is using your infrastructure as code framework of choice - Terraform or CloudFormation.

Monitoring can be done with whatever your cloud platform provides.

If you need to fail and scale independently.

-you can use small EC2 instances behind an application load balancer and within autoscaling groups with host based routing for request routing.

- converting a stand-alone api to a container is not rocket science and nor should it require any code rewrite.

- if you need to run scheduled Docker containers that can also be done with ECS or if it is simple enough lambda.

- the first thing you should worry about is not “containerization”. Its getting product market fit.

As far as needing containerization for orchestration, you don’t need that either. You mentioned Nomad. Nomad can orchestrate anything - containers, executables, etc.

Not to mention a combination of Consul/Nomad is dead simple. Not saying I would recommend it. In most cases (I’ve used it before), but only because the community and ecosystem is smaller. But if you’re a startup, you should probably be using AWS or Azure anyway so you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure.

> It's an afternoon worth of research to understand the basic concepts. Then, with the powerful and intuitive tooling you can spin up your own cluster on your computer in minutes and practice deploying containers that.

Source? I’ve never heard of someone going from “what’s kubernetes?” to a bare metal deployment in 4 hours.

That's more for minikube, which is a few minutes to run, as it is specifically for developer to test things locally on their computer.

The basic concepts in k8s are also pretty easy to learn, provided you go from the foundations up -- I have a bad feeling a lot of people go the opposite way.

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