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- Hacker News
- It's not uniformity, it's cargo culting and offloading thinking to group norms. Doesn't help engineers are some of the most arrogant people alive and refuse to admit anything is complicated, as they consider it some kind affront to their intelligence.
I would not advise asking the majority of CTOs these questions either. Many got to that position by saying what people want to hear, which is the "average" safe answer. They will parrot whatever is "hot" at that time because it's the least risky response. They are not your friend nor a reliable source.
by codemog - Well, I totally get the benefits that made those people choose Kubernetes. It's just that those benefits could be had w/o running a massively complicated piece of machinery that is mostly engineered to solve problems I don't have.by avhception
- Adopting k8s when you hire your _second_ engineer (first after the CTO)? That’s a red flag that the CTO’s priorities are wrong and he’s just enjoying tinkering with his infra instead of solving the users’ problems.
- None of those arguments make sense.
Uniformity ? Try deploying openbao inside kube, if kube decides to restart your pods, you're in for unsealing them at 3am, waking up everybody who owns a Shamir key. So bao stays out of the cluster, or pinned to certain nodes, defeating the purpose entirely. Also, with the ultra wide variety of tools at every layer of the stack, uniformity is a joke ; there are no 2 kube cluster deployment that are the same really.
Standardized knowledge ? The operating system is standardized knowledge. Any competent SRE should be able to login into a Linux box and figure out what's running there. And if you let your previous ops shadow it all you're just a pretty bad CTO.
Tracing who does what ? First of all anybody with admin access can run one time jobs just like anybody with sudo can run one time commands. That's like chapter 01 of the kube doc. Also again at the kube layer itself, below the helm chart, the ops who set that up or updates it can and will change stuff that breaks stuff.
Kube isn't necessarily bad and has it's purpose but it's not a product. It's like Linux, a complex piece of tech that requires a lot more knowledge than "just push this helm chart" to work.
by bionsystem - There is a core 20% to Kubernetes which is very nice, mostly being the Deployment and Service management stuff. That along with a very basic GitOps for cluster management (an infra repo for operators using Flux, applying service level yaml from app repos in CI) above a cloud managed Kubernetes cluster, where you still keep your DB and build servers off the cluster, can be quite nice for a small team.
Beyond that, there are massive holes of despair to fall down if a novice team starts to engage with extensive operators (starving the control plane), DB operators (distributed persistence) and build operators (spikey, expensive loads). At least, I know that I've had to dig out of those holes.
I just hope people don't use k8s in the same way many use microservices: as a way to introduce complexity for complexity's sake.
by liampulles - So I’m personally a huge fan of k8s and while I agree it may be „complicated”, it’s because deploying applications is complicated. (I want to point out that there is no requirement no set up cert manager, ArgoCD, external secrets, etc. - and many people who’d consider a VPS would happily slap a .env with an unencrypted secret then ssh to update, but when they choose Kubernetes they take the long route of doing proper GitOps and complain that there are so many things to configure :)
But I found funny that the OP summarized to use Kubernetes when CTO is no longer the only dev.
by suralind - One year ago I might agree that Kubernetes is an overkill but today?
Ask your favorite GPT to generate manifests, get primary app into cluster with telepresence or execute straight from container and switch contexts and clusters like it's 90s again.
One reason I dislike Docker Compose and Docker is lack of isolation. Yes sure if you put your arm deep enough you can get it, but on local k8s I can spin cluster per workspace and not worry about conflicting ports between PostgreSQL instances.
Before LLMs writing consistent YAMLs was PITA but today on low/development scale it's pretty much free lunch.
by xlii - I made this decision at a startup (albeit when the eng team was ~30 people, and we had a monolith with ~10 supporting services). I wouldn’t do it again, even for the reasons stated in the article.
The uniformity is nice, we were moving from apps running directly ec2 instances provisioned with ansible. Each time we spun up a new service it was a process to get the ec2 instances provisioned just so.
But k8s is such a pain in the ass. One thing that I think people new to it don’t realize is that it’s not at all batteries included - to get a basic managed cluster setup, you’re still going to be installing a bunch of additional controllers (ingress, cert-manager, external dns to start). And then you’re on the hook for making sure all those processes stay up (hope the admission webhook controller for a critical resource doesn’t go down!). Then you’ve got to do a major upgrade on not only your cluster, but all of those controllers every ~3 months. And no one is shy about introducing breaking changes.
Also you’re introducing a huge amount of complexity with the k8s networking and dns layer that most startups have zero need for (if you’re on EKS, make sure to read about scaling and monitoring CoreDNS).
I think there is a real hole in the market for a simple solution that lets you deploy some containers to some instances in a declarative fashion without all of that complexity and does decent LTS versions. I imagine there’s something out there that does this, but k8s has really sucked up all the oxygen.
by mikeocool