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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

How can a NewsDesk application need kubernetes?

Wouldn't a single machine and a backup machine do the job?

Because it's a fully featured public relations platform, not just a "newsdesk" (though that's what it started as some 20 years ago).

We have a main monolithic application at the core. But there are plenty of ancillary applications used to run the various parts of our application (eg. analytics, media monitoring, social media monitoring, journalist databases, media delivery, LLM based content sugestion etc).

Then we have at least one staging deployment for each app (the monolith has multiple). All permutations of apps and environments reach about 50 applications deployed on the platform, all with their own highly available databases (Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch and soon ClickHouse).

Most simple applications that use k8s are doing it for autoscaling or no downtime continuous deployment (or both).

So basically 2 things you don’t need k8s to solve?

What would you use to solve these problems?

VMs and load balancers?

From the documentation on the site it says that they're running on dedicated servers from Hetzner... So they aren't auto-scaling anything, they are paying for that hardware 24/7. It makes absolutely no difference what the number of running containers are, the cost remains constant.

You don't need anything. You choose the most convenient tool according to your professional judgment. I certainly hope that nobody is using Kubernetes because they are against the wall, and instead decide to use it for its features.

Is business running a complete application stack on a single machine?

A lot of businesses don’t need more than a couple machines (and can get away with one, but it’s not good for redundancy).

my vps reboots every 18 months or so..

Frequently yes, normally I'd say that the database server is on a separate machine, but otherwise yes.

I've seen companies run a MiniKube installation on a single server and run their applications that way.

I just looked it up - its because they run Ruby On Rails.

and so what?

Ruby On Rails is well known for not being at the fast end of the spectrum, so it needs lots of machines, and lots of machines gives reason to user Kubernetes.

A NewsDesk application written in something compiled for example golang would be much faster and likely could run on a single server.

The benefit of single server being you don't need kubernetes and can spend that development resource on developing application features.

I personally prefer Go to Rails, but let’s be real here: the market cap of Rails is probably, like, a hundred times the market cap of Go.

No doubt with Github, AirBnB, Shopify and other big sites RoR is bigger for the front end.

But now if lots of those sites are running on K8s with Argo CD or something or on a cloud platform where the infrastructure is provisioned with Terraform Go is supporting a great deal of things but it's far less visible.

I believe Crystal is worth a look here.

In theory, from a performance point of view, we could easily run our main Rails monolith on a single server.

One does not chose single server deployments when reaching for four nines of uptime though. We also run a lot of ancillary applications / staging environments etc which is what warrants a cohesive deployment platform.

More context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41492697

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