- Corba, MRI -> http apis
- XML, Soap -> json
- Flash -> html5
- Perforce, svn, mercurial -> git
Etc. We can’t think of anything better than k8s right now, but that’s just how it works. The moment that new tech appears, we all will be asking ourselves “how could we possibly use k8s?”
HTML5 is definitely not simpler than Flash was. I'd argue, it's far more complex, if you include all the sub-technologies and frameworks required to reach feature parity.
There was also no "natural" progression from Flash to HTML5. Oracle and the browser vendors had to run an involved depreciation campaign to get developers off flash and move them to HTML5. If you had left the web ecosystem on it's own, my guess is, we'd still be writing flash applications today.
> Perforce, svn, mercurial -> git
This progression was definitely natural, but I doubt again that git is less complex than svn or mercurial. However, one big advantage of git is that it is extremely easy to set up: You can just install it and use it locally without bothering any admins or setting up any servers. Once you are already using it, it's also easy to connect your repo to a server.
So, I'd argue, git has better UX and better availability than the alternatives, but it's not necessarily simpler.
I think most people don't need full feature parity. That's why a lot of these techs take off. They need something that is easier to understand.
Similar with kubernetes, there's like 5 permutations of software deployment people actually want to do. Deployments are one of those but there are still a few areas that you have to get hacky with StatefulSets to achieve. Once some PaaS-wrapper for kubernetes takes off we'll see the V2 of that idea as a stand alone cluster management thing. If someone nips some ideas from MaaS [0] we might even see on-prem bare metal take off again once people realize they're getting screwed on perf/bandwidth and many of the benefits of cloud providers are already provided to you by something like Kube.
[0] - https://maas.io/
Git is very simple. There are basically just four concepts: blobs, trees, commits, and pointers to commits.
However, git is far from easy! The UX is haphazard and confusing and many people are scared of venturing outside of their couple of memorized commands.
As far as I remember Mercurial was easier to start with but Github came along and won.
How was it before ? A bunch of unstandardized shell scripts and ansible playbooks that you could not reliably automate, let alone port to a different topology ? How could we possibly use that ?
Eh, nothing unstandardized about POSIX shell scripts, as opposed to a bunch of ever-changing YAML files with questionable semantics.
I think this generation of "cloud natives" have drunk too much of the cool aid served by "cloud providers" and their clever faux grassroots marketing/blogs.
As compared to the Linux and BSD "movement" (no such thing), which was about liberating ourselves from having to run apps on commercial OS's, based on a well-understood OS baseline (POSIX, a term coined by RMS).
Kubernetes is not a defecto and always better replacement of Ansible and shell scripts. In most small scale deployments, the value brought by Kubernetes is trumped by the costs of complexity. Bunch of scripts you say? Now you have bunch of yaml files laying around. Atleast before, you could find and fix problems manually quickly. Now, first find someone who has been in the weanies if kubernetes and it’s ecosystem to fix your problem.
In large scale infrastructure, kubernetes may bring the standardisation that is needed. Being able to hire people who knows kubernetes would be easier than hiring people who know how you wired your infra with ansible playbooks and scripts.
Portability you say? How easy do you think it is to move your infra(not just the apps, but - users, security rules, storage etc) to another kubernetes provider? EKS to AKS? Do you think AWS IAM and whatever equivalent Azure uses would be straight portable? Your S3 buckets and it’s policies to Azure block storage? Selling K8s with infra portability is a lie.
Applications - yes, but that is achievable by other means as well.
However, moving from 1 cluster in one region to another within another, is very simple. And that did not exists before kubernetes.
No, the complexity of Kybernetes is mostly in its auto-tuning and auto-scaling features. That's the stuff that needs to be re-engineered from the ground up in an elegant way. If history is any guide, we'll probably end up with some variant of it in systemd sooner rather than later.
Also, I do wonder what "elegant way" would be, considering that k8s is a very elegant system (once you notice that YAML is just one of the serialization formats to make it easier for raw API access by humans).
The reason k8s took off is because it provides the fief that devops engineers so desperately need to be motivated to stay on the job. (And that's mostly a good thing. Look at software testing to see what happens when you don't give developers career incentives.)
Portability between cloud providers is not imaginary. Same for portability of network configuration.
The big thing is JSON has common basic building blocks (simple types) so you are unlikely to see the same class of interop problems like SOAP and friends had ... "oh look this defines a new type my Python soap / xml lib doesnt natively support" (happened to me a few times, most memorable was akamai soap api using a custom list-of-string type nothing in python would parse out of the box)
However, it seems protobuffers (or alternatives like flatbuffers, cap'n proto) are still niches compared to JSON.
However I have yet to convince anyone at an org that isn't already using them that they will change things for the better.
Schema once, code everywhere. It is really nice.
Have you seen Buf? https://buf.build/
No, thanks for sharing! I will have a look!
In terms of the wire-format and the low-level concepts, HTTP2 and 3 are completely different from HTTP1.x. it's not an extension like HTTP1.1 was, it's a complete reinvention.
However, what they did was to reuse the high-level semantics and the "API" of HTTP1, so as a web developer you can pretty much pretend you're still using HTTP1 and let the browser and web server do the rest. This makes transition significantly easier.
I could imagine something similar with K9s. Maybe some other product will come along that supports (a subset of) the k9s API but does something different under the hood. I believe, k9s itself did so with Docker: You can still define k9s images using Dockerfiles, even though no piece of Docker is actually involved in the process.
25 years later and still, worse is better.
>Perforce, svn, mercurial -> git
Not sure I agree with those two. Edit: Someone beats me to it.