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Comment by speedgoose | Hacker News Reader

Containers are indeed cumbersome but what's even more cumbersome is software that work on your laptop, pass the tests, and fail in production for whatever reason such as a different software version of a dependency.

So I rather deal with containers. However never do kubernetes, it has nice features but it's not worth it for small and medium companies.

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"It works on my machine" is not the problem which is always solved by containers. I had several cases where it worked on my docker on my machine.

I disagree, Kubernetes is becoming a default choice. Small companies still want declarative config, load balancing and zero downtime deployments. It is so easy now to spin up a managed cluster and deploy an app, the complexity argument has been well addressed by the community and vendors

When I stopped working a few months ago, major cloud providers still had outstanding issues on their managed kubernetes.

The complexity of the configuration is huge. Zero downtime deployments and load balancing can be achieved without the complexity of kubernetes.

For example, drag and drop of .php files on a FTP server did that 15 years ago.

What happens if you need to drag and drop 2 php files and someone makes an HTTP request that gets processed right in-between the update of each file ?

They will surely get something weird, an error at best. Containers allow transactional deployments and FTP does not.

True. Perhaps you can upload to a temporary folder first, rename the old production folder to something else, and rename the temporary folder to the normal production folder. You may serve a 404 error if someone manages to do a request between the two renaming operation but I'm sure it's fine.

It's definitely better, but then it's not ZDD is it :)

Or just change a symlink to the new folder

> zero downtime deployments

> drag and drop a PHP file

These two things run in conflict. It’s not about not dropping requests - It’s about a sane state and error reproducibility. If you drag the wrong file, there will be plenty of downtime...

True. But if you apply the wrong YAML file in kubernetes too. If your container has the wrong version too.

Anyway, I'm not advising for uploading PHP files through FTP on live servers in 2020, I took it as an example of something we used to do without kubernetes.

This is an oversimplification of the problem. You need to drain the requests to the old version then wait until the new one passes a health check before rerouting the traffic

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