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Comment by harpratap | Hacker News Reader

I have said this multiple times in the past (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361176 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23243626) and will say it again - You (business logic developers) are not meant to use K8s directly, you are supposed to use a PaaS built on top of K8s (like Cloud Functions, Lambda etc)

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But this makes no sense. Why would a cloud operator even bother with k8s if the customer is only interacting with functions? It’s much more efficient to bypass Kubernetes and run directly on the cloud’s native system (like borg).

I think you’re right though - Kubernetes is a massive red herring, we should ideally be running containers/functions on as close to bare metal as possible. Fundamentally, VMs are the wrong abstraction if all your code is containerized.

Joyent’s triton is the closest thing we have to this... I really don’t know why AWS/Azure/GCP haven’t cottened onto this, it would massively reduce their COGS and improve our developer experience.

> Why would a cloud operator even bother with k8s if the customer is only interacting with functions?

Because there are various "tiers" of users, some companies (like coinbase) could actually leverage K8s in their Codeflow/Odin project and prevent a lock-in. But a regular developer looking to just "get things shipped" isn't meant to waste his/her time with pure K8s.

> Kubernetes is a massive red herring

We agree but on a different note. The biggest selling point of K8s is it's API design. The entire industry needs to converge on one "defacto" standard of packing and deployment. Google's Cloud function is a perfect example of this. The API is based on K8s and Knative but under the hood it actually runs directly on GCE rather than GKE. What happens underneath is hidden from business developer, you only care about the data in your yaml and your docker image.

>> I really don’t know why AWS/Azure/GCP haven’t cottened onto this

Conflict of interest. If k8s yields to the most revenue why would they try to decrease that? If some customers are so delusional that they go for an inefficient abstraction so be it. Btw. this is my experience with k8s too, people use it because it is a trend. Not a single company / developer could justify using it to me over leaner resources like EC2, ASG, cloud native resources, etc.

How about companies who don't want to rely on cloud and want on-prem as much as possible? Or those who don't want to be tied to a single vendor? Apple is already getting rid of their Mesos based PaaS and moving to Kubernetes.

>> How about companies who don't want to rely on cloud and want on-prem as much as possible?

I don't know. Are you saying that staying on-prem means you have to use k8s? Google is not a single vendor?

>> Apple is already getting rid of their Mesos based PaaS and moving to Kubernetes.

And? Should every other company follow Apple?

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