Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by movedx | Hacker News Reader

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> I know of such a case, where a single engineer could leverage the helm chart open source community, and set up a scalable infrastructure, with prometheus, grafana, worker nodes that can scale independently of web service, a CI/CD pipeline that can spin up complete stacks with TLS automated through nginx and cert-manager, do full integration tests, etc. I found that to be quite impressive, for one person, one year, and would probably be completely impossible if it wasn't for k8s.

But that's the thing though: they didn't do it alone. You literally pointed out that this wasn't true almost immediately: "leverage the helm chart open source community". They used the work of others to get to the result.

Also, I highly doubt they could debug something if it went wrong.

I simply cannot believe anyone would advocate, or believe, that because a Helm chart makes it simple to create a complex piece of infrastructure it must also be true that maintaining it is also simple. It's really.

I was able to do something similar by myself in only about a month or so (ops and production ready with backups etc) using https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tech_talks/getting-st...

Once you understand the concepts it's not hard to debug. It's fair to acknowledge that kubernetes is complex, but also we should not ignore the real work that has been done in the past few years to make this stuff more accessible to the developers that want to learn it.

Also, saying it's not "alone" in this example I think is not fair. What would you count as "alone"? Setting up the kubernetes cluster from scratch and writing your own helm charts? Using that same logic, I can't say that because someone else designed and built the hardware it's running on. I think it's fair to say that if someone, independent of coaching, regardless of the underlying infrastructure produced some production grade infrastructure by themselves, they certainly did it alone.

Using the helm charts from the community is arguably still doing it alone. There isn't anything back and forth. It's just the right tool for the right job. But, this starts being about language and semantics. Like saying that following a best practices on how to configure nginx isn't doing it alone, because someone else wrote that. Helm charts just very often expose what needs to be configured, and otherwise follows those best practices.

As for debugging. You do have a point that it becomes more difficult. But, this also holds true for any of the alternatives discussed her (lambdas, terraform). I'd argue that when it all comes down to it, that because you can spin up the entire infrastructure locally on things like minikube, that it makes it many times more easy to debug than other cloud-provider-only solutions.

> They used the work of others to get to the result.

Should everyone go back to assembly on bare metal, then?

Lol you think you get computer. Use hands to mine lithium, go.

One would also need to independently discover much of math and physics in order to say they did it themselves according to that definition.

I think you mean silicon though.

There is very little software development that does not rely on the products of open source communities these days...

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