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Comment by rekrsiv | Hacker News Reader

I've yet to encounter a non-smelly k8s deployment that was started before everyone knew how it works or why it works.

On the other hand, once everyone on the team has experience building such a system from scratch, then deploying k8s and using it somehow becomes straightforward.

It's almost as if we need to learn how a tool works before being able to use it effectively.

Anyways, what we (actually didn't) replace it with:

  - Don't let your devs learn about k8s on the job.
  - Let them run side-projects on your internal cluster.
  - Give them a small allowance to run their stuff on your network and learn how to do that safely.
  - Give your devs time to code review each other's internally-hosted side-projects-that-use-k8s.
  - Reap the benefits of a team that has learnt the ins and out of k8s without messing up your products.

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Maybe its just my team, but dev's dont need to know k8s. It certainly doesn't hurt, but they should be able to write code and get their jobs done without knowing much about k8s at all. Basic shit like how to get logs, but thats a given for all platforms

> but dev's dont need to know k8s

If somebody else on the team already knows k8s. The problem is a lot of places just give devs admin access and let them go hog wild. If devs don't know k8s they can't make significant changes without waiting for the one guy who knows k8s to do it.

Give a man a k8s, he will deploy for a day. Teach a man to k8s, he will deploy for at least 5 years while the hype cycle continues.

But can your team succeed without having people who:

1. Are motivated by the sort of curiosity that would frustrate them if they were blocked from knowing about k8s

2. Are motivated by the sense of responsibility that would unnerve them if they didn't understand 1 abstraction layer beneath their work.

You don't need to solve this problem if k8s already works for you.

What do you mean with side projects? Are they paid?

If you want your Devs to learn kubernetes you should pay them for doing it.

If you can't, hire a contractor with the expertise you need.

I would interpret 'side project' here as a work project that is not your primary and has low stakes for delivery into production timelines or expectations.

I don't really understand this. Work is usually prioritized. If it has low stakes for delivery into production then it should have a lower priority than other activities, but that doesn't make it a side project.

If you don't let developers prioritize some time to play around with new concepts and ideas and to learn how they work, they'll play around to learn in your products.

I feel like you're conflating multiple unrelated topics together. This isn't advice on how to use another team's experience, or cut costs, or maintain your team morale.

It is difficult to tell at a glance whether an engineer is qualified to effectively use a tool. Letting them self-train by working on self-projects in isolation compounds this effect.

The goal of this exercise is to give time and space to your devs to practice in a safe environment, while allowing them to push, deploy and review projects internally as if they were core products, so that other SMEs are allowed to spend some time every week reviewing those projects for smells and issues before those ideas make it into a core product.

Running a side project on company infrastructure seems like a disaster waiting to happen for both parties.

It's true that running side projects on a company cluster in an environment where no one is quite sure how to use the tool properly is a disaster waiting to happen.

Fortunately, k8s can act as a very secure sandbox when it's configured properly, so you'll know how to mitigate such a disaster once your company has trained its engineers on how to use the tool effectively.

I took it to mean "sandbox"

I took it to mean that infamous mythical Google 20% project.

It's not mythical. Gmail and Google Calendar were both 20% projects. They were built to solve for bad internal web mail (mirapoint, I think... ?) and Oracle Calendar (which was absolute trash on Linux).

It's not as common as some would have you believe but it is real. A teammate spent his 20% on underwater topography on Google Earth and another spent his on the glider thing.

I'm not surprised 20% is not more common, but I am surprised among 20%-enabled companies that the norm isn't to have the company host side projects for all employees. Insurance, snacks, gym memberships, mobile plans and laptops, but not the one thing all hackers need?

Having an employee turn up a popular side projects while being vendor-locked onto your platform sounds like it should be more popular among rich people.

Yes I was being deliberately hyperbolic.

The way it is should actually be sold to the average entry-level fresh-out-of-college Google hire is probably closer to the way I framed it, though, than the examples of Gmail and Google Calendar which are pretty much two unicorns.

it likely means internal tools that are just within the company like companies internal wiki.

You can provision vclusters to give each dev (each or even) that gives the space to play with the env without it being a problem.

Cattle not pets after all.

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