[irontoby]

Because Kubernetes is a complex beast with many moving parts, and learning about all those moving parts becomes more and more important as your usage grows.

Personally I've used Stackpoint.io to provision some small clusters but I was very excited to see this project because deploying my own cluster from scratch is next on my todo list. Kelsey Hightower's "Kubernetes the Hard Way"[1] is the canonical go-to reference here but it's also very daunting so this looks like a great middle ground.

Let's face it, even today the k8s docs can be quite sparse sometimes or gloss over the details, so knowing how all of the pieces work from the ground up can be a big help. Plus, you prevent vendor lock-in when whatever automated tool you're using doesn't solve your use-case or decides to start charging a lot of money.

[1] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way

[fndrplayer13]

I agree with this assessment. We decided to do "kubernetes the 'sorta' hard way" by leveraging the Saltbase installer with some level of customization and full control via terraform of how our infrastructure was being allocated. I think its valuable to learn what the tool is doing if you have to maintain it. When something breaks, an upgrade has issues, or you need to better understand the system to make a decision, I feel that you gain a lot in setting up a system yourself. I think you'll be more likely to know precisely where to look to debug things. You also get closer to the tool which makes it easier to contribute back into the community. You also get the benefit of making your own infrastructure decisions. Yes k8s can provision ELBs and EBS volumes (and their equivalents in Google Cloud, Azure, etc) as well as autoscale nodes via a cluster addon, but the big moving pieces, such as instances, VPCs, Networking, etc, remain well-defined in Terraform or some other infra-as-code. That means that you can decide how to deploy that etcd cluster, how it gets backed up, whether or not its encrypted at rest, etc. Generally speaking, we just value the level of control and insight that we get out of controlling the stack definition ourselves. To some extent that may be antithetical to the purpose of k8s, since the goal of the project overall seems to be simplification and centralization of best practices of deployment.

With all that being said, kops is an incredible tool (as are others) and we used it to learn about the system and test some of the functionality for ourselves. Can't recommend it enough.

[ben_jones]

And if you want to be awed look up Kelsey Hightower's Github profile.