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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

The attraction of this stuff is mostly the ability to keep your infrastructure configurations as code. However, I have previously checked in my systemd cofig files for projects and set up a script to pull them on new systems.

It's not clear that docker-compose or even kubernetes* is that much more complicated if you are only running 3 things.

* if you are an experienced user

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Having done both: running a small Kubernetes cluster is simpler than managing a bunch of systemd files.

Yeah this is my impression as well which makes me not understand the k8s hate.

The complexity of k8s comes the moment you need to hold state of some kind. Now instead of one systemd entry, we have to worry about persistent volume claims and other such nonsense. When you are doing things that are completely stateless, it's simpler than systemd.

If you need to care about state with systemd you still have the "nonsense" of persistent volume claims, they are just something you keep in notes somewhere, in my experience usually in heads of the sysadmins or an excel sheet or a text file that tries to track which server has what data connected how.

Understand that in the hypothetical system we are discussing, there are something like 1-2 servers. In that case the "volume claim" is just "it's a file on the obvious filesystem" and does not actually need to be spelled out they way you need to spell it out in k8s. The file path you give in environment variables is where the most up-to-date version of the volume claim is. And that file is free to expand to hundreds of GB without bothering you.

Things get iffier when you start doing things like running multiple instances of something (maybe you're sticking two test environments for your developers), or suddenly you grew a bit or no longer fit on the server and start migrating around.

The complexity of PVCs in my experience isn't really that big compared to this, possibly lower, and I did stuff both ways.

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