Comment by shadycuz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadycuz | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have been using Kubernetes for my side projects and personal home services for almost 5 years now. I only ever have 1 pod per service and I deploy pretty infrequently.

For me its because how much easier Kubernetes makes my life. I'm using digital ocean's managed kubernetes offering. This means I don't have to worry about the cluster. The OS and updates and all that are managed for me. Same thing with cluster scaling. I just keep adding or removing services and they make sure the cluster is right sized. Basically I just dont ever have to worry about infra.

The next nice thing is the community support. Do I want a load balancer/reverse proxy with auto certificate renewal? It's a simple install command away from running. How about a HA database? MFA? Block storage? It's like magic.

The third thing is that most services are going to have a pretty similar deployment/testing strategy. So when I want to stand up a new one. I can copy 2 or 3 files from another repo, do a find and replace on the App name and port number and deploy a new service with just one command. Again, its like magic.

While I dont use this feature, I like the fact that I know I can move my setup to anywhere I want. Move my cluster into my house? on another cloud provider? This would be really easy to lift and shift.

> The OS and updates and all that are managed for me.

I can see this being a nice feature! I feel like the updates have never been a big issue for me in the past though unless it breaks some sort of dependency. In a typical Linux server `sudo apt-get update` has never been a big pain point for me :)

> I can copy 2 or 3 files from another repo, do a find and replace on the App name and port number and deploy a new service with just one command. Again, its like magic.

I just looked it up because I was curious, and it looks like setting up an Apache server on Linux is pretty much this same process, as in copy a couple files and tweak a couple settings. Also, I think my biggest question is if you're only using this for home services why can't they all live on one server and deal with it in a traditional style? Why does each service need its own environment as opposed to one environment with multiple services?

I feel like Kubernetes is hoisting all the traditional problems of deployment and infrastructure up to another level. Which is basically the definition of accidental complexity, adding additional complexity where none was warranted.

Once again, I can see how this is very useful if you're Google and need to ensure that if a service goes down it can spin itself back up on an arbitrary machine, but 99% of homebrewed services probably don't need this capability.

Then again, maybe I just enjoy the infra side of things and hacking together a build system and this is just my bias speaking :)

The cloud provider might handle OS and platform upgrades for you, but don't forget about updating your images! :)

Then again, dealing with that is also something Kubernetes can help with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com