People use Kubernetes for way too small things, and it sounds like you don't have the scale for actually running Kubernetes.
My app is fairly simple node process with some side car worker processes. k8s enables me to deploy it 30 times for 30 PRs, trivially, in a standard way, with standard cleanup.
Can I do that without k8s? Yes. To the same standard with the same amount of effort? Probably not. Here, I'd argue the k8s APIs and interfaces are better than trying to do this on AWS ( or your preferred cloud provider ).
Where things get complicated is k8s itself is borderline cloud provider software. So teams who were previously good using a managed service are now owning more of the stack, and these random devops heros aren't necessarily making good decisions everywhere.
So you really have three obvious use cases:
a) You're doing something interesting with the k8s APIs, that aren't easy to do on a cloud provider. Essentially, you're a power user. b) You want a cloud abstraction layer because you're multi-cloud or you want a lock-in bargaining chip. c) You want cloud semantics without being on a cloud provider.
However, if you're a single developer with a single machine, or a very small team and you're happy working through contended static environments, you can pretty much just put a process on a box and call it done. k8s is overkill here, though not as much as people claim until the devops heros start their work.
k8s appears to be a corporate welfare jobs program where trillion dollar multinational monopolistic companies are the only ones who can collectively spend 100s of millions sustaining. Since most companies aren't trillion dollar monopolies, adopting such measures seems extremely poor.
All it signals to me is that we have to stop letting SV + VC dictate the direction of tech in our industry, because their solutions are unsustainable and borderline useless for the vast majority of use cases.
I'll never forget the insurance companies I worked at that orchestrated every single repo with a k8s deployment whose cloud spend was easily in the high six figures a month to handle a work load of 100k/MAU where the concurrent peak never went more than 5,000 users, something the company did know with 40 years of records. Literally had a 20 person team whose entire existence was managing the companies k8s setup. Only reason the company could sustain this was that it's an insurance company (insurance companies are highly profitable, don't let them convince you otherwise; so profitable that the government has to regulate how much profit they're legally allowed to make).
Absolute insanity, unsustainable, and a tremendous waste of limited human resources.
Glad you like it for your node app tho, happy for you.
Coolify is full of features, but the UX suffers and they had a nasty breaking bug at one point (related to Traefik if you want to search it.) Dockge is just a simple interface into your running Docker containers and Komodo is a bit harder to understand/come up with a viable deployment model, and has no built-in support for things like databases.
Dokploy is more Heroku-styled: while you can deploy third-party apps (it's just Docker after all), it seems really geared towards and intended for you to be deploying your own apps that you developed, alongside a "managed" database (meaning, the DB is exposed in the UI, includes backup functionality, and can even be temporarily exposed publicly on the internet for debugging.)
Coolify feels a bit like a mix of the two deployment models, while Dockge is "bring your own deployment" and Komodo offers to replace Terraform/Ansible/docker-compose through its own declarative GitOps-style file-based config but lacks features like managed databases, or built-in subdomain provisioning.
Whether it's a worthy mention or not, I'm not sure. I'd like to think its worthy :)
Disclaimer: I am the maintainer.
Is it complex? Yes, but so is the problem it's trying to solve. Is its complexity still nicer and easier to use than the previous generation of multimachine deployment systems? Also yes.
It really confuses me how someone can argue for cloud providers over a decent open solution without realising their argument is simply they don't want to be managing the thing.
And that's fine, most teams shouldn't be neck deep in managing a platform. But that doesn't make the solution bad.
You're going to want most of what K8s has anyway: blue-green deployments, some way to specify how many replicas you want, health checks, etc.
The initial setup cost is annoying if you've never done it before, but in terms of maintenance it's very very easy.
That being said I love exe.dev and have been a happy customer since launch. It's a different use case but they do an amazing job at it. Very, very easy personal cloud dev box. But K8s is very very good too, just for production workloads rather than personal ones!
I run it at home and at work, and while I do hate installing it, once that part is done I've never run into these problems that people claim requires a 20 person(!) team to baby sit it. Maybe my scale is too small or whatever, but its hard not to think that maybe they are just "holding it wrong"...
Point being, it's not the tools the causes the probem.
Or that guy is just a really bad programmer.
But the point was it was in a comparble situations without the microservices / k8s / whatever pet tech you want to hate on.
The last 20 years has given us a lot of great primitives for folks to plug in, I think that lots of people don't want to wrangle those primitives, they just want to use them.
I think Amazon ECS is within striking distance, at least. It does less than K8S, but if it fits your needs, I find it an easier deployment target than K8S. There's just a lot less going on.
The deployment files / structure were mostly equivalent with the main differences being I can't shell into ECS and I lose kubectl in favour of looking at the AWS GUI ( which for me is a loss, for others maybe not ).
The main difference is k8s has a lot of optionality, and folks get analysis paralysis with all the potential there. You quickly hit this in k8s when you have to actually need the addon to get cloudwatch logs.
This is also where k8s has sharp edges. Since amazon takes care of the rest of the infrastructure for you in ECS, you don't really need to worry about contention and starving node resources resulting in killing your logging daemon, which you could technically do in k8s.
However, you'll note that this is a vendor choice. EKS Auto Mode does away with most of the addons you need to run yourself, simplifying k8s, moving it significantly closer to a vendor supported solution.
Is there a specific reason why you can't shell into ECS? IIRC, I was able to do so by following the guide [0].
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/new-using-amazon-ecs...
This is well put and it's very similar to the arguments made when comparing programming languages. At the end of the day you can accomplish the same tasks no matter which interface you choose.
Personally I've never found kubernetes that difficult to use[1]. It has some weird, unpredictable bits, but so does sysvinit or docker, that just ends up being whatever you're used to.
[1] except for having to install your own network mesh plugin. That part sucked.
So having everyone use the same deployment model (and that’s typically k8s) saves effort. I don’t like it for sure
I like to think if we had a K8s environment a lot of this would be built out within it. Having that functionality abstracted away from the developer would be a huge win in my opinion.
This is certainly the case from all the third person accounts I hear. Online. I never actually met a single one that is like that, if anything, those same people are the ones that are first to tell me about their Hetzner setups.
The trouble is that we are literally expected to do this everywhere we go. I've personally advocated for approaches which use say, a pair of dedicated servers, or VMs as in GPs example. If you want it outside of AWS/GCP/Azure, you're regarded as a crazy person. If you don't adopt "best practices" (as defined by vendors) then management are scared. Management very often trust the sales and marketing departments of big vendors more than their own staff. Many of us have given up fighting this, because what it comes down to is a massive asymmetry of information and trust.
The challenge is convincing people that "golden images" and containers share a history, and that kubernetes didn't invent containers: they just solved load balancing and storage abstraction for stateless message architectures in a nice way.
If you're doing something highly stateful, or that requires a heavy deployment (game servers are typically 10's of GB and have rich dynamic configuration in my experience) then kubernetes starts to become round-peg-square-hole. But people buy into it because the surrounding tooling is just so nice; and like GP says: those cloud sales guys are really good at their jobs, and kubernetes is so difficult to run reliably yourself that it gets you hooked on cloud.
There's a literal army of highly charismatic, charming people who are economically incentivised to push this technology and it can be made to work so- the odds, as they say, are against you.
Around the time of the pandemic, a company wanted to make some Javascript code do a kind of transformation over large number of web-pages (a billion or so, fetched as WARC files from the web archive). Their engineers suggested setting up SmartOS VMs and deploying Manta (which would have allowed the use of the Javascript code in a totally unmodified way -- map-reduce from the command-line, that scales with the number storage/processing nodes) which should have taken a few weeks at most.
After a bit of googling and meeting, the higher ups decided to use AWS Lambdas and Google Cloud Functions, because that's what everyone else was doing, and they figured that this was a sensible business move because the job-market must be full of people who know how to modify/maintain Lambda/GCF code.
Needless to say, Lambda/GCF were not built for this kind of workload, and they could not scale. In fact, the workload was so out-of-distribution, that the GCP folks moved the instances (if you can call them that) to a completely different data-center, because the workload was causing performance problems, for _other_ customers in the original data-center.
Once it became clear that this approach cannot scale to a billion or so web-pages, it was decided to -- no, not to deploy Manta or an equivalent -- but to build a custom "pipeline" from scratch, that would do this. This system was in development for 6 months or so, and never really worked correctly/reliably.
This is the kind of thing that happens when non-engineers can override or veto engineering decisions -- and the only reason they can do that, is because the non-engineers sign the paychecks (it does not matter how big the paycheck is, because market will find a way to extract all of it).
One of the fallacies of the tech-industry (I do not mean to paint with too broad a brush, there are obviously companies out there that know what they are doing) is that there are trade-offs to be made between business-decisions and engineering-decisions. I think this is more a kind of psychological distortion or a false-choice (forcing an engineering decision on the basis of what the job market will be like some day in the future -- during a pandemic no less -- is practically delusional). Also, if such trade-offs are true trade-offs, then maybe the company is not really an engineering company (which is fine, but that is kind of like a shoe-store having a few podiatrists on staff -- it is wasteful, but they can now walk around in white lab-coats, and pretend to be a healthcare institution instead of a shoe-store).
Personally, I believe that the tech industry sustains itself via technical debt, much like the real economy sustains itself on real debt. In some sense, everyone is trying to gaslight everyone else into incurring as much technical debt as possible, so that a way to service the debt can be sold. Most of the technical debt is not necessary, and if people were empowered to just not incur it, I suspect it would orient tech companies towards making things that actually push the state of the art forward.
A lot of criticism of k8s is always centered about some imagined perfect PaaS, or related to being in very narrow goldilocks zone where the costs of "serverless" are easier to bear...
This feels like a reminder that everything "Cloud" is still basically the same as IBM's ancient business model. We've always just been renting time on someone else's computers, and those someone else people are always trying to rent more time. The landlords shift, but the game stays the same.
They're getting kickbacks from cloud vendors. Prove me wrong.
better than nothing, I don't blame em.
Money ain't got no owners, only spenders.
I think this is the crux of the matter. Also, "everybody is doing it, so they must be right" is also a very common way of thinking amongst this population.
…IBM
…Microsoft
…AWS.”
But yeah, let's just spin-up a shadow IT VM with Debian like GP said, it's easy!
That’s literally how they sold AWS in the beginning.
Cloud won not because of costs or flexibility but because it allowed teams to provision their own machines from their budget instead of going through all the red tape with their IT departments creating… a bunch of shadow IT VMs!
Everything old is new again, except it works on an accelerated ten year cycle in the IT industry.
And yes, a dev that's able to do that properly (stress on properly) is indeed a signal of a better overall developer but they are a minority and anyway as orgs scale up there is just too much of "side salad" that it becomes a separated dish.
If you'd know Kubernetes, you know not to use it. I say that as someone who used to do consulting for it.
The reality is that yet again "making money" completely collides with efficient, quality, sane productive work.
For me one of the main reasons to leave that space is that I couldn't really deal with the fact that my work collides with a client's success. That said I have helped to get off that stuff and other things that they thought they needed, that just wasted time and money. It just feels odd going into a company that hired you to consult on a topic only to end up telling them "The best approach for you is not doing that at all". Often never. Like some people thought "Well, if we have hundreds of thousands or even millions of users" and the reality was that even in these scenarios if you went away from that abstract thought and discussed a hypothetical based on their product they realized that they'd still be better off without it. Besides the fact that this hypothetical often was in a future that made it likely that they said they'd likely have completely different setup so preparing for that didn't even make sense.
I think a big thing related to that was/is the microservice craze where people end up moving to a complex architecture for not many good reasons and then they increase complexity way faster than what they actually deliver in terms of the product, because it somehow feels good. I know it does, I've been there. When in reality the outcome often is just a complex mess with what could have been a relatively simple monolith. And these monoliths do work. And in the vast majority of cases they are easy to scale, because your problem switches from "how do we best allocate that huge amount of very different services across our infrastructure" to (for the most part) "how do we spin up our monolith on one more server" which tends to be a way easier to tackle service.
And nothing stops you from still using everything else if you want. Just because it's a monolith doesn't mean you need to skip on any of the cloud offerings, etc. For some reason there seems to be that idea that if you write a monolith you are somehow barred from using modern tooling, infrastructure, services, etc. Not sure where that comes from.
imo this should achieve a nice balance?
SOAs have most utility in scaling teams, not software: creating independent services allows autonomy to independent teams if they apply a few simple patterns for good SOA.
Though imagining the unholy existence of an init system who's only job is to spin up containers, that can contain other inits, OS images, or whatever ..... turtles all the way down.
Tech like Flatpak or Snap is closer to Docker than "machines" are — except that Docker has local, virtualized networking built-in as the IPC layer.
I'm not surprised even in the slightest that DevOps workers will slap k8s on everything, to show "real industry experience" in a job market where the resume matches the tools.
I mean, I worked with people who were suprised that you can run more applications inside ec2 vm than just 1 app.
To be fair though, that's true for every profession or skill.
> I mean, I worked with people who were suprised that you can run more applications inside ec2 vm than just 1 app.
I've seen something similar where people were surprised that you can use an object storage (so effectively "make HTTP requests") from every server.
Every company used to have a bespoke collection of build, deployment, monitoring, scaling, etc concerns. Everyone had their own practices, their own wikis to try to make sense of what they had.
I think we critically under-appreciate that k8s is a social technology that is broadly applicable. Not just for hosting containers, but as a cloud-native form of thinking, where it becomes much easier to ask: what do we have here, and is it running well, and to have systems that are helping you keep that all on track (autonomic behavior/control loops).
I see such rebellion & disdain for where we are now, but so few people who seem able to recognize and grapple with what absolute muck we so recently have crawled out of.
Using new technology in something small and unimportant like a setup script is a perfect way to experiment and learn. It would be irresponsible to build something important as the first thing you do in a new language.
But if you're working with others, you should default to using standard industry tools (absent a compelling reason not to) because your work will be handed off to others and passed on to new team members. It's unreasonable to expect that a new Windows or Linux sysadmin or desktop support tech must learn Rust to maintain a workstation setup workflow.
(Apologies to Cake. And coders.)
This is a problem I've run into enterprise deployments. K8s is often the lowest common denominator semi small platform engineering teams arrive on. At my current employer, a platform managed K8s namespace is the only thing we got in terms of PaaS offering, so it is what we use. Is it overpowered? Yes. Is it overly complex for our usecase? Definitely. Could we basically get by hosting our services on a few cheap mini computers with no performance penalty? Also yes.
Value is not that I got job done at a day's notice. It is black mark that I couldn't package it as per industry best practices.
Not doing would mean out of job/work. Whether it is happening correctly is not something decision makers care as long it is getting done anyhow.
That's basically why k8s is so compelling. It's tech is fine but it's a social technology that is known and can be rallied behind, that has consistent patterns that apply to anything you might dream of making "cloud native". What you did to get this script available for use will closely mirror how anyone else would also get any piece of software available.
Meanwhile conventional sys-op stuff was cobbling together "right sized" solutions that work well for the company, maybe. These threads are overrun with "you might not need k8s" and "use the solution that fits your needs", but man, I pity the companies doing their own frontiers-ing to explore their own bespoke "simple" paths.
I do think you are on to something with there not being food taste making, with not good oversight always.
Everyone else is communicating they are doing Agile while being very far away from it ;)
No Kubernetes whatsoever.
I agree with you.
My personal strategy has always been to start off in docker compose, and break out to a k8s configuration later if I have to start scaling beyond single box.
You don't set up k8s because your current load can't be handled, you do for future growth. Sometimes that growth doesn't pan out and now you're left with a complex infrastructure that is expensive to maintain and not getting any of the benefit.
This is why you get many folks over-thinking the solution and picking the most hyped technologies and using them to solve the wrong problems without thinking about what they are selling.
You don't need K8s + AWS EC2 + S3 just to host a web app. That tells me they like lighting money on fire and bankrupting the company and moving to the next one.
But given how I always see "you don't need k8s because you're not going to scale so fast" I am feel like even professional k8s operators have missed the fundamental design goals of it :/ (maximizing utilization of finite compute)
All of those other tools are complicated and fragile
1. People expect k8s to be an opinionated platform and it's very happy to let you make a mess
2. People think k8s is supposed to be a cross platform portability layer and ... it maybe can be if you're very careful, but it's mostly not that
3. People compare k8s/cloud/etc to some monolithic application with admin permissions to everything and they compare that to the "difficulty" of dealing with RBAC/IAM/networking/secrets management
4. People don't realize how much more complicated vanilla Linux tooling and how much more accidental complexity is involved
and then also package this so that you and other developers can get the infrastructure running locally or on other machines.
Nomad has neither of these problems.
But if its use was confined to this use case, pretty much nobody would be using it (unless as a customer of the organization's infra) and barely would be talking about it (like how there isn't too much talk about Borg).
The reason k8s is a thing in the first place is because it's being used by way too many people for their own goods. (Most people having worked in startups have met too many architecture astronauts in our lives).
If I had to bet, I'd wager that 99% of k8s users are in the “spin a few containers to run your web app” category (for the simple reason that for one billion-dollar tech business using it for legit reasons, there's many thousands early startups who do not).
Teams are free to use EKS internally.
But to quote someone: "you are not Google".