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Comment by cc81 | Hacker News Reader

I've been in discussions about internal applications with few hundreds users and very moderate amounts of data being shuffled and stored and some people, of various backgrounds, are just so convinced that we need to go all in on Kubernetes, Microservices, Istio etc.

And all I can think about is "Hey, you could build this with a small team as a simple monolith and with proper caching you could probably run this on one or two raspberry pi, that is the amount of power you actually need here".

Don't get me wrong I do think they absolutely have their place and in other parts of the company we have much larger software development projects and they are absolutely making great use of Microservice architectures and Kubernetes and is getting a lot out of it. But that is 100+ teams building a product portfolio together.

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> And all I can think about is "Hey, you could build this with a small team as a simple monolith and with proper caching you could probably run this on one or two raspberry pi, that is the amount of power you actually need here".

If your product has a global audience who needs to CRUD stuff, caching and a single raspberry pi won't get you very far in the game.

If it's just an intranet stuff with a few hundred users and your front-end isn't very chatty then you're right, you don't need much.

If you don't pile abstractions on top of abstractions on top of kubernetes on top of docker, you'd be surprised how much you can do with a single small-sized instance.

k8s has no performance overhead and can be useful even for simple applications (like for reproducible dev environments and CI). Agreed, otherwise.

I'm not talking about performance overhead, I'm talking about architecture overhead. Kubernetes doesn't have any advantages over not using Kubernetes for simple applications. Reproducible dev environments and CI you can get easily without Kubernetes, without having to add complex solutions for logging, profiling and other introspection tools.

One could argue that you need the reproducible dev environments and CI to be solved BEFORE even start using Kubernetes.

> Kubernetes doesn't have any advantages over not using Kubernetes for simple applications.

So out-of-the-box support for blue/green deployments and fully versioned deployment history with trivial undo/rollbacks are of no advantage to you?

> Reproducible dev environments and CI you can get easily without Kubernetes, without having to add complex solutions for logging, profiling and other introspection tools.

I'd like to hear what you personally believe is a better alternative to kubernetes.

And by the way, Kubernetes does not support not requires distributed tracing tools not "logging, profiling, and other introspection tools". That's somethings entirely different and separate, and something that you only use if for some reason you really want to and make it your point to go out of your way to adopt and use.

In fact, distributed tracing is only a thing not due to kubernetes but due to you operating a distributed system. If you designed a distributed system and get it up and running somewhere else, you still end up with the same challenges and the same requirements.

Apparently HackerNews used to run from a single application server + Cloudflare caching, but later moved away from Cloudflare. Unsure how many web servers it runs on now. [0]

In 2016, Stack Overflow ran on 11 IIS web servers, but they really only needed 1.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496344

[1] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

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