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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

> The biggest problem with these posts is that authors seem to fail to see how K8s isn't targeting home servers or small companies.

Who would you say are in the target audience of Kubernetes?

I doubt most medium to large companies I see implementing Kubernetes could be considered a good fit for Kubernetes. If you want to run on-prem / colo you are probably better of with something simpler like Nomad. If you want Kubernetes it's probably a better idea to use a hosted Kubernetes solution like Google's offering. For most teams it's probably too much complexity to be able to maintain, troubleshoot, secure, update, etc.

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>Who would you say are in the target audience of Kubernetes?

Everything else - I literally said "K8s is enterprise stuff". Now if we go to specifics then it depends of what the company does, maybe they'd do just fine with Nomad or a managed solution like ECS.

>If you want Kubernetes it's probably a better idea to use a hosted Kubernetes solution like Google's offering.

Well I agree? All of the big companies I've been in used EKS and before EKS was decent there was some maintenance overhead. It'd still be less than the maintenance overhead to maintain the full list of features that K8s provides with Nomad, as Nomad doesn't provide any of those and you'd need to seek solutions outside of the product and try to fit them in.

The same way you'd not buy a car if you're going to drive yourself quarter of a mile once a week, you'd not use such a complex solution to run a few dozen containers.

> I doubt most medium to large companies I see implementing Kubernetes could be considered a good fit for Kubernetes. If you want to run on-prem / colo you are probably better of with something simpler like Nomad.

Our path has been Ansible -> Ansible+Docker -> Docker Swarm -> k8s. We absolutely don't need k8s, but the other options all had downsides.

1. Nomad was on our list and probably would've been better, but there were no managed Nomad solutions at the time and it was not as widely used as other solutions

2. Our time on Swarm was /ok/, but it was more and more obvious that being on the lesser walked path was a problem, and it's future made us run away from it

3. k8s gave us a nice declarative deployment mechanism

4. We can switch to a managed solution down the road with less friction

> If you want Kubernetes it's probably a better idea to use a hosted Kubernetes solution like Google's offering.

This may not be true in the future with distributions like k0s[1]

[1]: https://k0sproject.io/

> K8s is enterprise stuff

The comment you’re replying to already said whom.

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