Kubernetes uses all those underlying AWS technologies anyway (or at least an equivalently complex thing). You still have to be prepared to diagnose issues with them to effectively administrate Kubernetes.
Are you saying you don't use any of your cloud vendor's supporting services, like CloudWatch, EFS, S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, SQS, SNS?
If you're running on plain EC2 and have any kind of sane build process, moving your compute stuff is the easy part. It's all of the surrounding crap that is a giant pain (the aforementioned services + whatever security policies you have around those).
Everyone's situation is different, of course, but there is a reason that cloud providers have these supporting services and there is a reason people use them.
In my experience it is less work than keeping up with cloud provider's changes [1]. You can stay with a version of Kafka for 10 years if it meets your requirements. When you use a cloud provider's equivalent service you have to keep up with their changes, price increases and obsolescence. You are at their mercy. I am not saying it is always better to set up your own equivalent using OSS, but I am saying that makes sense for a lot of things. For example Kafka works well for me, and I wouldn't use Amazon SQS instead, but I do use Amazon SES for emailing.
[1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprec...
I build AMIs for most things on EC2. That interface never breaks. There is exactly one service on which provisioning is dependent: S3. All of the code (generally via Docker images), required packages, etc are baked in, and configuration is passed in via user data.
EC2 is what I like to call a "foundational" service. If you're using EC2 and it breaks, you wouldn't have been saved by using EKS or Lambda instead, because those use EC2 somewhere underneath.
Re: services like SQS, we could choose to roll our own but it's not really been an issue for us so far. The only thing we've been "forced" to move on is Lambda, which we use where appropriate. In those cases, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
> cloud provider's equivalent service you have to keep up with their changes, price increases and obsolescence
AWS S3 and SQS have both gone down significantly in price over the last 10 years and code written 10 years ago still works today with zero changes. I know because I have some code running on a Raspberry Pi today that uses an S3 bucket I created in 2009 and haven't changed since*.
(of course I wasn't using an rPi back then, but I moved the code from one machine to the next over the years)
It can be simple but first you have to learn it.
Given that life is finite and you want to accomplish some objective with you company (and it’s not training dev ops professionals), it’s quite interesting having the ability to outsource a big part of the problems needed to be solved to get there.
Given this perspective, much better to use managed services. Let’s you focus on the code (and maintenance) specific to your problem.
In terms of the effort to deploy something new, for my organization it's low. We have a Terraform module creates the infrastructure, glues the pieces together, tags stuff, makes sure everything is configured uniformly. You specify some basic parameters for your deployment and you're off to the races.
We don't need to add yet more complexity with a Kubernetes-specific cost tracking software, AWS does it for us automatically. We don't have to care about how pods are sized and how those pods might or might not fit on nodes. Autoscaling gives us consistently sized EC2 instances that, in my experience, have never run into issues because we have a bad neighbor. Most importantly of all, I don't have upgrade anxiety because there are a ton of services stacked on one Kubernetes cluster which may suffer issues if an upgrade does not go well.
You're saying that the solution to k8s is complicated and hard to debug is to move to another cloud and hope that fixes it?
Not in the slightest. I'm saying that building a platform against k8s let's you migrate between cloud providers because the cloud provider's system might be causing you problems. These problems are probably related to your platform's design and implementation which is causing an impedance mismatch with the cloud provider.
This isn't helpful knowledge when you've only got four months of runway and fixing the platform or migrating from AWS would take six months or a year. It's not like switching a k8s-based system is trivial but it's easier than extracting a bunch of AWS-specific products from your platform.
I mean, yeah, that’s exactly what’s required to happen, and it’s a good thing because only your system engineers need to do most of the legwork. If you have a team of system engineers, you probably have a much bigger cohort of application engineers.
A lot of things go from not viable to viable if you have the luxury of allocating an entire team to it.
Oh it's Wednesday, ALB controller has shat itself again!