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Comment by VvR-Ox | Hacker News Reader

> These kinds of posts always focus on the complexity of running k8s...

Yes but that is also the worst already that you could criticize about k8s.

Complexity is dangerous because if things are growing beyond a certain threshold X you will have side effects that nobody can predict, a very steep learning curve and therefor many people screwing up something in their (first) setups as well as maintainability nightmares.

Probably some day someone will prove me wrong but right now one of my biggest goals to improve security, reliability and people being able to contribute is reducing complexity.

After all this is what many of us do when they refactor systems.

I am sticking with the UNIX philosophy at this point and in the foreseeable future I will not have a big dev-team at my disposal as companies like Alphabet have to maintain and safe-guard all of this complexity.

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From a developer perspective, k8s seems ripe for disruption.

It does a bunch of junk that is trivial to accomplish on one machine - open network ports, keep services running, log stuff, run in a jail with dropped privileges, and set proper file permissions on secret files.

The mechanisms for all of this, and for resource management, are transparent to unix developers, but in kubernetes they are not. Instead, you have to understand a architectural spaghetti torrent to write and execute “hello world”.

It used to be similar with RDBMS systems. It took months and a highly paid consultant to get a working SQL install. Then, you’d hire a team to manage the database, not because the hardware was expensive, but because you’d dropped $100k’s (in 90’s dollars) on the installation process.

Then mysql came along, and it didn’t have durability or transactions, but it let you be up and running in a few hours, and have a dynamic web page a few hours after that. If it died, you only lost a few hours or minutes of transactions, assuming somone in your organization spent an afternoon learning cron and mysqldump.

I imagine someone will get sufficiently fed up with k8s to do the same. There is clearly demand. I wish them luck.

It seems to be. When you start implementing something, you'll soon find that most of that complexity is inherent, not accidental. Been there, done that, didn't even get the T-Shirt.

Today it's much easier to package nicer API on top of the rather generic k8s one. There are ways to deploy it easier (in fact, I'd wager that a lot of complexity in deploying k8s is accidental due to deploy tools themselves, not k8s itself. Just look at OpenShift deploy scripts...)

Exactly - I deployed a k8s cluster with eksctl in about 10 min. Deployed all my services within another 10min (plain Helm charts).

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