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Comment by AtomicOrbital | Hacker News Reader

I decided to become a server developer as opposed to front end to avoid the js ecosystem meltdown... however I see server side tools like kubernetes have also become so ladened with exposing complexity we too find little time for actual creative development

watching a time lapse of a single biological cell develop for it's first few hours reminds me of the software tooling landscape... throbbing, twisting, shaking, bifurcating

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What? Dont you like to learn 3/4 almost-useless DSLs, have to modify 3 config files for the smallest change and plumb more breaking things than Mario?

Mario doesn't do any plumbing.

It’s-a-me, the SRE!

It solves a lot of scaling problems though

> It solves a lot of scaling problems though

Problems that most devs wish that they had but don't.

Infrastructure as Code is powerful; Terraform + k8s (with nginx-ingress/cert-manager/external-dns) and you never need to worry about infrastructure again...

At $work we use(d) the following:

- Heroku

- AWS ECS Fargate

- AWS EC2 (AutoScalingGroups) + Docker

- AWS EKS (managed K8s) + Helm charts

Everything (except Heroku) is/was IaaC.

They are listed in the ascending order of how many problems they cause, and how much we have to worry about them ... I will never ever touch K8s if I can possibly avoid it.

At my last job, heroku was the cause of at least an outage a month. The redis add-on was particularly troublesome, as I recall.

That's not to say the rest aren't bad, of course, but I'd much rather have control in my hands than wondering if the next time it goes down again how many angry phone calls we'll get and if there is even anything we can do about it.

Give me a few bare servers any day, but you take what you can get I guess.

Yeah, until your team starts using PaaS services and your terraform modules are a mess that barely supports a third of the product's configuration, and that process is going to accelerate more and more over time.

So does a beefy server and a nicely parallelized backend service.

Problems that most of Kubernetes users don't have, and could have been solved with some unfashionable 2/3 servers and a load balancer.

Which 99% of users don’t have and never will

You don't have to use Kubernetes. Simple webservers and FTP and SSH still exist.

No need to go back 30 years.

If doing professional work, use heroku, App Engine or any similar PaaS solution.

If doing hobby/side projects, Dokku is a great self hosted heroku alternative. Easy to setup and use.

Kubernetes is a very low level tool. If you want to run it yourself you need s full team of infra experts to not fuck it up. So I think it could be a great tool for large companies with many teams and a lot of money.

As usual the problem is not taking into account context, and single developers or startups thinking they need to do what google does so they go full Go microservices spa Kubernetes crazy. Add some of the Agile bullshit on top of this and welcome to your average startup nowadays.

I'm doing both professional and hobby work with VPSs and SSH and there is no problem with that. Few less layers to take care of

What about backups? What about the vps going down? What about upgrading the server? What about security updates?

Professional work on VPS is either a lot more work, or not that professional. If it is not being a lot more work then you're not providing the same service, security and guarantees to your customers.

This is where PaaS shine. Easy and safe. And if you factor in your own time, then cheaper too.

All of those problems have nothing to do with using a vps.

Yes, they do. You get these "for free" with any PaaS. You have to do it yourself with vps or custom in house kubernetes.

Thing is, as a startup, there might be better solutions to your problem than Kubernetes, but investors specifically look to check the „use K8s“ checkbox on their rating sheet. It’s just as stupid as it sounds, and there’s nothing you can do if you need venture money.

To add to this, one could also learn Erlang or use kubernetes alternatives like Nomad, which, last I checked, has had less levels of abstraction than kubernetes.

All my stuff is fairly simple AWS via CDK, plenty of time for creative dev. But I do agree, k8s is not a requirement.

I’ve helped people use Kybernetes for quite a few things, but I can’t help but notice that there is even a policy agent that allows you to write rules in JavaScript now. There is a minimum level of complexity when you use Kubernetes, but there seems to be absolutely no upper bound.

https://www.jspolicy.com/

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