Also AWS is also, complex, also requires configuration and also generates alerts in the middle of the night.
It's still a lot cheaper than managed service.
You just mentioned one dimension of what I described, and "when you know what you are doing" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in your argument.
> Also AWS is also, complex, also requires configuration and also generates alerts in the middle of the night.
I'm confused. So we are on agreement there?
I feel you might be confusing my point with an on-prem vs AWS discussion, and that's not it.
This is encouraging teams to run databases / search / cache / secrets and everything on top of k8s and assuming a magic k8s operator is doing the same job as a team of humans and automation managing all those services for you.
What do you think AWS is doing behind the scenes when you run Postgres RDS? It's their own equivalent of a "K8S operator" managing it. They make bold claims about how good/reliable/fault-tolerant it is, but the truth is that you can't actually test or predict its failure modes, and it can fail and fails badly (I've had it get into a weird state where it took 24h to recover, presumably once an AWS guy finally SSH'd in and fixed it manually - I could've done the same but without having to wait 24h).
When you use a k8s operator you're using an off the shelve component with very little idea of what is doing and how. When things go wrong, you don't have a team of experts to look into what failed and why.
The tradeoff here is obviously cost, but my point is those two levels of "automation" are not comparable.
Edit: well, when I write "you" I mean most people (me included)
If you want to fully replicate AWS it may be more expensive than just paying AWS. But for most use cases it's simply not necessary.
You think so. The real answer is maybe maybe not. They could have all left and the actual maintainers now don't actually know the codebase. There's no way to know.
> When things go wrong, you don't have a team of experts to look into what failed and why.
I've been on both sides of consulting / managed services teams and each time the "expert" was worse than the junior. Sure, there's some luck and randomness but it's not as clear cut as you make it.
> and they have a lot of know-how on what went wrong, what the automation is doing, how to remediate issues, etc.
And to continue on the above I've also worked at SaaS/IaaS/PaaS where the person on call doesn't know much about the product (not always their fault) and so couldn't contribute much on incident.
There's just to much trust and good faith in this reply. I'm not advocating to manage everything yourself but yes, don't trust that the experts have everything either.
You sure about that? I used to work at AWS, and although I wasn't on K8S in particular, I can tell you from experience that AWS is a revolving door of developers who mostly quit the instant their two-year sign-on bonus is paid out, because working there sucks ass. The ludicrous churn means there actually isn't very much buildup of institutional knowledge.
You can also trade operational complexity for cash via support contracts and/or enterprise solutions (like just throwing money at Hitachi for storage rather than trying to keep Ceph alive).
That said on my todo-list is some tooling to make simple cases with linux NFS or SMI-capable servers work as PVC providers.
And that number might be high, in larger more established companies there might be more engineers who want to stick to their comfort bubble. So many developers reject the idea of writing SQL themselves instead of having the ORM do it, let alone know how to configure replication and failover.
I'd maybe hire for the people who could and would, but the people advocating for just having the cloud take care of these things have a point. You might miss out on an excellent application engineer, if you reject them for not having any Linux skills.