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Comment by blackoil | Hacker News Reader

These posts come up so frequently, people keep falling for buzzwords they don't understand and then start blaming the tech. Distributed systems are all cool and fun but use them as a last option when you have exhausted all other choices.

> I took a moment to calculate the cost of hosting my app on the K8s offerings of a Hyperscaler like AWS, Google or Azure just to figure out that this won’t be an option for me.

Clear signal that you can't justify the overheads. Cloud services are costly but in most cases you'll pay similar cost in terms of time and in some cases lot more if you pick something complex that you don't know about.

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> Cloud services are costly but in most cases you'll pay similar cost in terms of time and in some cases lot more if you pick something complex that you don't know about.

Even just something like EC2 instances is costly - and a surprising amount of stuff in the cloud is just containers or EC2 instances, before redundancy even. Adding in specialized services makes things even more costly.

Problem is that nowadays it's hard to find a team that knows how to properly handle hardware - if you manage to get a handful of people that know how to do that cloud is only sensible for very few edge cases.

And as the article states - in many cases you probably don't even need all that fancy from K8s. I can for the cost of using K8s cloud stuff just put a second copy of our hardware in a different DC (or maybe even a third one), and just fail between DCs if needed. Way simpler setup, and excludes a lot of failure cases I'd catch with a K8s setup.

> These posts come up so frequently, people keep falling for buzzwords they don't understand and then start blaming the tech. Distributed systems are all cool and fun but use them as a last option when you have exhausted all other choices.

I've been in the SaaS application business since the early 2000's. When I first started, the big infra question was running on in-house infra or data-center infra. If it was the latter, then the follow-up question was which hosting provider. Regardless, as an Engineer, you were likely touching something that looked and felt like a variation of the box sitting under your desk.

Eventually we got cloud providers, serverless, containers, etc. Growing through the progression of technologies, they all seemed like a natural evolutiion of things to solve certain problems with other approaches.

For newer engineers starting out, they may only have seen these latter things, and at the scales and circumstances that make them a good choice. As such, it may not be that they're the new and shiny thing, but that they're the _only_ thing people have seen.

> use them as a last option when you have exhausted all other choices.

if one wants to run service with high availability (no downtime if server died), what are other choices then?..

Load balancers in front of a Proxmox cluster + Ceph storage (managed inside Proxmox) + federated/replicated databases (MySQL/MariaDB/Postgres etc)

Which sounds like self managed quite complicated distributed infra..

> Clear signal that you can't justify the overheads.

There's a difference between an EC2 instance and EKS pricing.

Bare minimum, one control plane, zero usage, no workload, EKS starts at $873 per year.

EC2 starts at $36/year. t4g.small (2 vCPU, 2GB) is $145/year.

"You are holding it wrong", huh?

From the homepage https://kubernetes.io/:

"Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications."

Do you see "not recommended for smaller-scale applications" anywhere? Including on the entire home page? Looking for "small", "big" and "large" also yields nothing.

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