Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

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> For most users, Kubernetes has added complexity and cost, but not value.

This may be true for small, simple systems, such as basic web apps, that don’t really need Kubernetes. If your system can fit on a single machine, or even two or three, why would you use a cluster orchestrator to run it?

But if you’re at a real company - not a mom and pop shop or similar - and you have multiple services implemented by multiple teams, you’d be hard-pressed today to find something that makes more sense than Kubernetes. Yes, there are PaaS offerings that can hide some of the inherent complexity, but they tend to run into limits, cost issues, etc. quite quickly. Not to mention they’re often implemented on top of Kubernetes anyway.

Kubernetes is worth learning if you want to understand the needs and design of non-trivial software systems. Everything it offers corresponds to requirements such systems have, and it provides an extremely well organized, unified way of managing that. It’s one of the most well-designed software products of the 21st century.

I think the issue is that there is a not yet emerged standard for the mid size companies that we hear less about here on HN but make up a huge amount of business in the US. Kubernetes may be the gold standard for larger companies or tech heavy companies of all sizes. But what about the mid size organisations ?

I've worked for a mid sized and a large company in the same fintech space. Like you said larger one use eks and the entire aws stack, mid sized one is still using 15 years old on prem stack and partially self hosted cloud service.

Now they are moving to microservice fleet but will have so much devop overhead, so I'm building this platform that's basically a simple managed microservice + job service, not sure how many companies will be interested

Mid-size orgs can use PaaS if they want to. But the core issue is, standing up a system with high availability, security, automated deployments, etc. etc. is non-trivial.

There's a small but vocal subset of the HN audience who thinks "I can do all that with one hand tied behind my back," but they're not a scalable solution to actual business requirements.

I've worked at companies with 5 people (3 of them cofounders lol), with 30 people, with 100+ people, with 500 people, and with tens of thousands of people (global financial, healthcare, and telecoms corps.) Give me an example of these "mid size companies" that don't have a good technological solution available to them and I'll either tell you what they should be using, or why what they imagine they want doesn't exist.

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