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Comment by chucky_z | Hacker News Reader

I'd take the alternate view. K8s is a huge relief from both development and operations, but it absolutely requires an entire team of dedicated folks along with re-tooling everything to fit it's paradigm. This is true of all orchestration systems, but especially true for k8s. If you have a dozen eng teams and 50 microservices, and 2 or 3 devops/SRE people because it's all in AWS/GCP/Azure, k8s is going to crash and burn. If you have a dozen eng teams with 2+ devops/SRE folks in each of them, and a handful of extra folks to form a whole new team for K8s you're in great shape.

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We have multiple data centers and a similarly sized devops team (separate from SRE). They're exceptionally skilled and lord I pray they'll make it, because I know it won't be an easy journey.

None of our teams have dedicated devops engineers. Teams just have engineers that do everything: back end, front end, deployments, monitoring dashboards. Teams write run books for SRE. Dev Ops supplies eng teams tooling for deployments.

I've argued many, many times we spread our engineers too thin and we need greater specialization for better outcomes. We have enough engineers, but the problem is everyone owns their own thin but very tall vertical slice of the total system.

If everyone truly understands their thin and tall slice, please keep those people they are worth their weight in gold. If anything, it sounds like you have an SRE organization right now, and could use some extra developers and operators. :)

My experience doesn't match yours.

I've seen k8s managed by a couple of DevOps (among the rest of the infrastructure) and used in a company with 3-5 teams (and 200 microservices, but not that much code, they just drank the microservices kool aid). That was a migration from running containers on EC2 (semi automated orchestration) to running and maintaining k8s on EC2.

Best infra experience I've seen in any company I worked at (and the company wasn't that great overall).

I also ran some smaller scale K8s by myself while doing eng management work, so I disagree K8s is as hard as people make it to be

We have 3 infra eng + manager for over a dozen devs and a bunch of services deployed on k8s (including all DBs). K8s itself is self managed (nothing is hosted) and has been the least of our concerns operations-wise.

Jealous of your 4:1 ratio.

We’ll probably grow that ratio quite a bit in the coming year or two but ownership is setup such that it shouldn’t be a proportional increase in our workload. K8s and some other tooling we use do make that considerably easier if your thread that needle right

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