Hacker News Reader

Comment by ec109685 | Hacker News Reader

One other advantage of Kubernetes that is overlooked in the article is the benefit with a heterogeneous cluster of instant auto scaling. For example you have 10 apps on a k8s cluster that each use the same resources, you can give 20% buffer for the cluster, which would let any single app use 300% of their allocation instantly. With VMs, you’ll be stuck waiting for VMs to spin up or have to give each app their own large buffer to handle bursts of traffic.

View on HN

It amazing to me how many people associate this with kube. You’ve had this for years in numerous ways, the only difference is some yaml and marketing.

What other solution is cloud agnostic as well as has an easy local dev story?

_any_ non-proprietary tool is "cloud agnostic". Kubernetes is bundled software, and achieves the things those pieces achieve. There is nothing holy about k8s specifically, the tools you train with are easy, and it's very easy to get skewed opinions on that.

For example a lot of people would find writing scripts cumbersome, but not a person who's written a lot of them. They're not any more fragile than other logic error capable software is

You didnt avtually answer the question: What free, cloud agnostic tools let me specify "keep 60% cpu load average" and work the rest out?

With k8s, a horizontal autoscaler is a few lines in a yaml file and the result works in any cluster run by any vendor.

Any load balancer will let you do that. Scaling is a few lines of scripts to do on any platform, and well worth the couple minutes, you don't even need a tool for just that.

No tool "works the rest out". It's _always_ a compromise, because inherent complexity can never be removed, only moved. What you gain in one area, encumbers another.

You may freely use k8s, but it's not magical nor easier to use than any existing systems. In fact adopting it often takes non-trivial time and the web is full of failure stories with very benign warnings and catastropic results.

Isn't that the benefit of cloud?

Maybe I'm spoiled by GCP and it's not the same in other providers; but I can have a brand new debian VM configured and operational in less than 10s (less the time that I run my own startup script).

Debian machines spawn with incredible speed; not much slower (if at all slower) than a new container.

Spawning a bare bones VM is easy and fast, the problem is getting the applications there, which is where k8s shines.

Maybe I'm spoiled then, it takes less than 2s to spin up my application on a new instance. :\

There are also many options for creating Debian based image files with all you need baked in.

I guess it depends very much on the application you have.

A lot depends on whether "bake application into AMI, use ASG to scale and zero-downtime deploy" is applicable or cost effective.

I think I've been in total of one company where it was somewhat true, and even there we didn't do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com