Hacker News Reader

Comment by liampulles | Hacker News Reader

There is a core 20% of kubernetes, which is deployments, pods services and the way it handles blue-green deployments and declarative based definitions, namespace seperation, etc. that is really good. Just keeping to those simple basics, using a managed cloud kubernetes service, and running your state (database) out of cluster is a good experience (IMO).

It's when one starts getting sucked down the "cloud native" wormhole of all these niche open source systems and operators and ambassador and sidecar patterns, etc. that things go wrong. Those are for environments with many independent but interconnecting tech teams with diverse programming language use.

View on HN

For me this is all Kubernetes is. I feel like people are often talking about two different things in discussions like this. For me it's just a uniform way to deploy stuff that is better than docker compose. We pay pennies for the control plane and workers are just generic VMs with kubelet.

But I think for many "kubernetes" means your second paragraph. It doesn't have to be like that at all! People should try settling up a k3s cluster and just learn about workloads, services and ingresses. That's all you need to replace a bunch of ad hoc VMs and docker stuff.

For a lot of company and project I worked on, this is the same conclusion I came to. 99% we only need / want is docker-compose++. Things like 0-downtime deployment out of the box, simple configuration system for replica set and other replication / distribution mechanism, and that is basically it.

I which there was something that did just that, because kube comes with a lot of baggage, and docker-compose is a bit too basic for some important production needs.

The author posted almost exactly this.

https://github.com/hadijaveed/docker-compose-anywhere

Why not use docker swarm?

Exactly this. Kubernetes has a million knobs and dials you can tweak for any use case you want, but equally they can be ignored and you can use the core functionality and keep it simple.

I can have something with nice deployments, super easy logs and metrics, and a nice developer experience setup in no time at all.

Yeah I found out my work was using kurbernetes. Given its reputation - having never used it before - when I asked if I could set up a server for some internal tooling I was braced for the worst.

What I actually got was a half an hour tutorial from the guy who set it up, in which he explained the whole concept (I had no clue) and gave me enough information to deploy a server, which I did with zero problems. I had automatic deployment from `git push` working very quickly.

To me this seemed like a no brainer. Unless you literally have one service this is waaay easier to use.

Granted I didn't have to set it up - maybe that's where the terrible reputation comes from?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com