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Comment by Melingo | Hacker News Reader

I'm so lost on so many choices this company did.

You de cloud and now use some mini tool like mrskd?

I'm running k8s on azure (small), gke (very big), rke2 on a setup with 5 nodes and k3s.

I'm totally lost why they would de k8s after investing already so much time? They should be able to work with k8s really well at this point.

Sry to say but for me it feels the company has a much bigger issue than cloud vs non cloud: no one with proper experience and strategy.

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If one of the co-founders/owners is writing the devops tooling from scratch... well, that's a decision.

Not saying it's necessarily a bad decision. But it's potentially driven more by personal interests than a dispassionate and strategic plan.

Means either the company is doing super well or about to fail, no in-between here

I'm not sure how well 37Signals is doing these days - Hey didn't make as big an impact as they had hoped and Basecamp probably has a core of loyal users but I don't think it's getting a ton of new customers. They're small and could probably keep going until their founders decide to retire though.

Completely agreed with this. K8s is not that operationally hard. The concepts are all there and it's just giving you a framework for it essentially.

Many k8s operators out there to help you self host it. Abandoning the entire concept is just wild.

It does seem like they just moved all of their infra components, and got rid of autoscaling.

Load balancing, logging, and other associated components are all still there. Almost nothing changed in the actual architecture, just how it was hosted.

I have a hard time seeing why this was beneficial.

Cost, mostly.

You reckon they cannot afford running some vms for the k8s control plane?

They say they will save $7 million over 5 years with this migration.

Sounds worth it to me.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-stand-to-save-7m-over-five-year...

That answers my question, they can afford it if they wanted to. Obviously they don't want to. I'm in their camp when it comes to the cloud vs own hardware.

How much will the many extra employees they will need cost them in 5 years?

Even if they had to hire two or three people to work on this full time (they won't) it'd still be a massive savings.

Depends on the quality and hr overhead.

Oncall, new features, security etc.

No small it department I worked with, was anywhere close to the features and quality of Google and co.

Maybe they'd rather pay coworkers than a giant tech company.

If I were small/mid company owner that would be perfectly good reason.

Which seems to be also the case for Basecamp/37signals.

Zero, which is why we're not using k8s on-prem. Our team is already handling the on-prem hardware/software environment, and this will consolidate our apps on a single platform methodology, allowing us to keep the same team size. Using mrsk allows us reduce the complexity of our servers, moving that into the Dockerfile.

If we had gone down the k8s on-prem rabbit-hole, I suspect we would have required more folks to manage those components and complexity.

I don't understand how having k8s means you need significantly more people.

It's just concepts put into a strict system. Now you're just shimming the same concepts with less supported hacks. Now you have to train your team on less used technology that isn't transferable to other roles. Sounds like technical debt to me.

We're arguing about generic approaches and the 37Signals folks are making specific decisions about their very specific situation (their app, their staff having time or not, their budget, etc).

To be fair, they don't seem to be saying their strategy is for everybody but the audience thinks so? I think we're talking past each other, tbh.

For me it's still the 'nor getting what issue they had with k8s'.

And I would love to spend a few days with there team to understand it.

wow, TIL the founder of RoR races LMP2 in Le Mans

he may have just become my new hero

Those k8s license fees will get ya.

I feel like this is the reason so many horrible kubernetes stacks exist.

This is very amusing to read!

This company invented Ruby on Rails and was in business before ‘cloud’ was a thing. Many things can be said about 37signals and DHH in particular, but lacking proper experience is definitely not one of those.

I am very curious why they had such a bad k8s experience while mine is the total opposite.

And just inventing known stuff doesn't mean they are infra or platform experts.

I grew into cloud in the same time frame as they did and I'm also a platform expert and k8s expert.

So are they automatically better in deployment and platforms because they invented ruby on rails?

Answer to your question is cos peoples experiences differ, wildly in some cases.

Your account was created 18hours ago so I can’t see really what support there is for this specific throwaway account to be declared an expert in anything. Are you self proclaimed expert or world renowned expert? Since they are world renowned buch… :)

And yes, I’m expert on these things, trust me :)

I only create my accounts adhoc because I spend too much time on discussions otherwise.

But my argument was more in sense of contradicting the original argument. No one is an expert just because.

I for myself I'm a cloud architect in a very big company and have introduced a k8s based platform in two projects. One internal on gke and one in a opensource project.

Both are used by 15-20 teams.

I also run k8s at home for fun and in a small startup.

I'm probably doing primarily k8s for 5 years and was a software engineer before.

I can understand declouding, but getting rid of Kubernetes seems like a lot of work for little gain.

They’re not thinking strategically, they’re thinking tactically.

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