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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

> In a sense, supervisors are very similar to Kubernetes, but they work on the application level instead of the cluster level.

Good article, and very worth sharing, but it could have done without that part. That's a terribly unhelpful analogy. For those who Kubernetes it's wildly misleading, and for those who don't it's meaningless.

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I use both kubernetes and OTP supervisors and don't find it misleading, rather I quite agree but maybe I'm missing something. I'm curious what you mean by that?

Interesting, thanks for the feedback. I find it misleading because Kubernetes is a massive platform that does all manner of things besides just supervising your Pods, and in fact I had to think about it for a while before concluding that the supervisory function is likely what the author was alluding to.

It strikes me as saying that an oxygen mask in a hospital room is like an airplane: sure they both provide a facility for providing oxygen to the user, but the airplane is significantly more complex than simply an oxygen delivery system. Probably a terrible analogy, just thinking off the top of my head.

I agree with your sentiment. I think a more apt metaphor than Kubernetes in its entirety would be comparing it to a Kubernetes ReplicaSet[1]. I can see some similarities there.

For fun, to expound on your analogy, maybe it's like comparing an airport to a hospital. They both feature a person you check in with (triage/ticket counter) to direct you to an appropriate room/gate depending on your needs, but the core mission of each are rather different.

[1] https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/re...

You don't find it misleading because you already know what an OTP Supervisor's role is limited to, and you know that Kubernetes (among a thousand other things) also provides that one feature. But its not a good analogy since it can only be understood by someone who doesn't need it to be explained.

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