Finding the Right PaaS for Kubernetes

Define 'normal' websites.

If can use static websites, or something like Heroku, then do so. K8s is basically irrelevant for this case. If you need to use VMs or containers, that's where the fun begins.

It is very tempting to just cobble together some bash scripts to install Apache, Nginx or the like, and try to forget about it. You mostly will, until you get pages. Maybe is some logs that are getting out of hand, maybe a process died and you forgot to add an auto-restart. Maybe your app got featured on hacker news... did you remember to create an auto-scaling group (or similar)? No? Now you'll be scrambling to clone your VMs. Do you have HTTPS (pretty much a requirement these days)? How are you rotating your certs? What happens when one of the machines go down? How do you even find which services are up? Now you have to configure a health check. I could keep going, but you get the picture.

For each and every one of these situations, K8s has an answer. Many of them are out of the box and for free. All you need to do is to provide a couple of YAMLs describing what you need. It will take care of the rest. You can deploy complex applications this way, in a standardized fashion. Yes, k8s looks complex, but it is trying to tackle a hard problem.

Basically, ask yourself this: would I benefit if I ran this thing on containers? Do I ever envision myself running this on more than one machine? If so, you would probably benefit from some container orchestration, of which K8s is the prime example.

I would advise against trying to install K8s by yourself, that can be a rabbit hole. Either use a cloud provider, use something like Kubeadmin or, if you are playing with one single machine, Ubuntu's micro k8s.

RedHat is very eager for you to use their software, which is cool, but they also seem to focus on really big enterprise with training videos and courses. I was looking more for a project that just has some markdown documents with an example I can run within a few minutes.

Did you use OKD? And what is your experience, I'm curious to hear from another developer what it's like! I could try it again later, because it sure looked exciting!