Show HN: Composability of software components is the biggest benefit of K8s | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Composability of software components is the biggest benefit of K8s

lab.computer

11 pointsairocker13 comments

I got 1.5 paragraphs into this article and ran into the term "helm chart", which I'd never heard before. I searched it and lo and behold, it (Helm) is a package management system for Kubernetes [1].

I'm sure this is quite basic entry-level stuff for the Kubernetes platform, but I haven't used it before. I find myself reading random articles on the topic so I can try to find an interesting use case for it but every time I seem to run into some new terminology like this and feel even more lost than I was before :)

1. https://helm.sh

AFAIK it is basic and a common way to install packages in k8s. Usually the developers of a project with k8s focus like Prometheus provide a helm chart for easy installation. However it is a package manager and easy confused with a distribution. I recommend to read "Who's at the helm?" [0] discussed a few days ago here [1].

0: https://dlorenc.medium.com/whos-at-the-helm-1101c37bf0f1 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25647753

> Little did we know the biggest advantage it offers: Encapsulation.

Someone that isn't a cloud provider running their own kubernetes setup is the classic story of wasted engineering.

That the OP states they were unaware that kubernetes biggest advantage was encapsulation is also concerning.

well we are on gcp but we can run on minikube. In my experience, on-prem k8s is not hard to run even in ha mode. You could do a lot with node problem detector, datadog and an ha k8s master

What does your company do? Why are you running your own cloud?

We build an online programming website for classrooms using notebooks for literate programming. Instructors are allowed to install anything and run background processes with root access before sharing the assignments with students. It also allows for auto grading and class management. We don’t run a cloud but we do run a kubernetes cluster. It enables us to give our users more flexibility.

"That the OP states they were unaware that kubernetes biggest advantage was encapsulation is also concerning." What is the concern here btw? Not everyone started before 2018

I wish Kubernetes SIG Apps was more productive...

Whats the difference between CDK8s, Pulumi and Helm.. I know about helm but then what the other 2 have over helm?

helm is like a package manager for kubernetes apps. Think apt-get but for your distributed system. But its input is a yaml file. It also provides for a templating engine which means everything you want to change for your app goes into one values.yaml file. Its values are substituted to the real kubernetes yaml files. It seems CDK8s is trying to do the same thing in code instead of yaml files which gives more flexibility but IMHO code is an overkill for this.

AWS chooses to do this with TypeScript: https://cdk8s.io/

this could be great need to look more

I feel like making iac as real code instead of yml makes it harder. Its better to make helm more powerful and make its syntax better.

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