In my opinion, the most common mistake is not in the article : using kubernetes when you don't need to.
Kubernetes has a lot of pros or the papers but in practice it's not worth it for most small and medium companies.
Kubernetes has a lot of pros or the papers but in practice it's not worth it for most small and medium companies.
Amazon's Elastic Container Service (ECS) on Fargate deployment type is probably a better option much of the time. Until you maintain your own k8s cluster (including the hosted variants on AWS, GCP, etc.) you might not realize how complex configuring k8s is.
While the AWS's ECS service may be more limited, I've found it leaves less room to do the wrong thing. Unfortunately, the documentation on ECS and the community support is inferior to k8s, but I'll accept that if I don't have to spend a whole day researching what service mesh to use with k8s and how to configure a load balancer and SSL certs.
But I generally agree with the premise that ECS is a better starting point for people just dipping their toe into containers.
ECS (with Fargate or EC2) is awesome but one might argue that it is still an overkill for a lot of people.
Some people look for scaling, immutability, effective resource utilization and they think they NEED containers. That is not entirely true. A lot of people would do totally ok with one EC2 instance.
Either way, kubernetes is awesome, there is a big community behind it maintaining a lot of tooling, docs, how-to guides, etc. That is very valuable for a lot of people too :)
Sorry—my comment was written poorly. I think the article is good as is and agree k8s or not is a different topic. My comment intended to be a reminder for all of us reading it that we should ask more questions before choosing a technology.
I’ve found a trend in engineering (including with myself), we sometimes forget to take a step back and see the forest.
x1e.16xlarge, 64 CPU, 2TB of RAM, $10k per month.
If yes, Kubernetes might make sense for you, if your company is large enough that a PaaS like Heroku is prohibitively expensive.
If no, you don't want Kubernetes.
https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/93525292372179353...
- Azure (still?) offers free clusters.
- GCP offers one free single-zone cluster.
If you need more than DO can offer in terms of compute instances, you can probably afford GKE/EKS, which is around 75$/month.
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Running highly-available control plane (K8s masters & etcd) by yourself is NOT cheaper than using EKS.
To achive high availability, EKS runs 3 masters and 3 etcd instances, in different availability zones. Provisioning 3 t3.medium instances (4 GB of memory and 2 CPUs) would cost the same as a completely managed EKS.
Not to mention the manual work you need to setup, maintain and upgrade such instances.
If someone knows about a reliable managed kubernetes, please let me know.
I might be remembering wrongly, but I think Azure actually used to offer multiple managed orchestration platforms, including DCOS and Swarm, before they went all-in on k8s.