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Comment by livinginfear | Hacker News Reader

I've managed to avoid working with Kubernetes thus far in my career. I admit I don't have a great understanding of it. I can't think of a single technology that seems to unanimously stir up such bitter feelings in the developer community. Not even node.js, or webpack is as contentious as k8s.

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Systemd stirs up similar angry because it was built for similar reasons to become this god-management-layer that’s useful for getting shit done but also hugely more complex (…in implementation at least) than the status quo it replaced.

I worked on Kubernetes/containers migration at Airbnb, and I wouldn’t recommend a Kubernetes investment for a company with <300 engineers, who can dedicate 10+ people to dealing with it. At Notion we are quite happy with Amazon ECS.

The comparison to systemd is often made, but imo very unfair.

systemd may have a complex implementation but it's usage is rather simple and consistent across distros so in that way it definitely simplifies on what came before it, which was an init system simple in its implementation but finicky and inconsistent in usage.

It's kind of like I'd much rather have a programming language that has a complex compiler but it takes care of so many details that its usage (programming) is simple - because I am not the one who has to deal with the compiler complexity - rather than making the jobs of the compiler devs easier, (why, if that's their primary job?), but making my everyday job programming in such language harder?

I don't understand why people always recommend ECS over EKS for smaller shops. EKS is kind of creaky, but we haven't really had any major problems with it, and the tooling around the k8s ecosystem is sooooo much bigger and better in terms of developer experience. We felt like we were constantly reinventing the wheel with ECS, and while I fully acknowledge that there's both less surface area and blast radius for things to go wrong with ECS, I'm not sure it's THAT much more stable. ECS is pretty half-baked too. Almost all of my problems are with EKS specifically, and if we compare ECS to GKE, I think the argument is even less strong.

Maybe trauma? After a couple years herding cats using YAML and kubectl I have been happy for others to herd the cats using HCL and Terraform.

Perhaps 10 people might be required if you're doing everything on-prem including storage and networking. If you're using a managed service, then I find it hard to believe a company should drop 1+ million on labor just to operate a cluster.

You are both missing nothing and missing everything. Haha.

Try to hold out for the next generation! It will surely arrive soon?

Do you use any container orchestrators today?

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