[yebyen]

You should take a look at Deis Workflow.

I say this in spite of the fact that it was announced last week[1], the next release of Deis Workflow will be the last (under the current stewardship, and probably under that name.)

It's just such a solid system, I would even more strongly recommend the (already EOL'ed early last year)[2] Deis v1 PaaS, except that you've already indicated you're moving to K8S, and Deis v2 is designed for K8S. I still recommend the v1 PaaS for people learning about principles of HA clusters. (Another disclosure: I have published[3] about how to do this, a work on how to do a cheap HA cluster using Deis v1 PaaS.)

I have a strong suspicion that Deis will live on after March under stewardship of new leadership from the community.

In the mean time, you have roughly 6 months of support from Microsoft, maybe I am overstating to say that they have committed to keeping the lights on for that long, but they have committed to merging critical fixes for that long (and we hope that in 6 months, Kubernetes will have solidified enough that we don't have to worry too much about breaking changes from upstream release mongers anymore.)

Personally I don't buy commercial support and it would not be the deal maker or breaker for me.

[1]: https://deis.com/blog/2017/deis-workflow-final-release/#futu...

[2]: https://deis.com/blog/2016/deis-1-13-lts/

[3]: https://deis.com/blog/2016/cheapest-fault-tolerant-cluster-d...

[gtirloni]

I'd advise against choosing core infrastructure components (that have a clear EOL deadline) based on strong suspicion.

Even more so in a landscape that's constantly changing like Kubernetes. You have zero guarantees that it'll be maintained and will keep up with new breaking changes.

[yebyen]

You know it's open source, right? I have zero guarantees that any of my open source projects that I use for business critical infrastructure aren't going to pack up shop and quit maintaining their stuff tomorrow.

You should know how your infrastructure works well enough to maintain it for yourself. I (personally) will be maintaining this one in the future, if necessary! We're working it out now. What do you mean by "strong suspicion?"

Please don't downvote because you read a few words you didn't like, I was upfront about this EOL date because I don't want it coming back later that I was dishonest about it, but my perception is not that "EOL" means it's dead, it is that "EOL" means it's done. Stability is a good thing. Microsoft also EOL'ed MSPaint.exe, and I remember how the community reacted. I think the quote was about "works for 99% of users and has been stable for over a decade? sounds like a good candidate for deletion!"

The project is cancelled because it's not strategically important to Microsoft, not because it's not viable or having technical issues. The core devs have chosen to work on more kubernetes-native tooling. They aren't abandoning Kubernetes, and I'll bet you don't have a competing product you can show me that has guaranteed to keep the lights on for the next 6 months.

[gtirloni]

Unfortunately, neither it being open source nor its technical prowess is reason sufficient for some people. That's a simplistic analysis. Most people using Linux don't know it the kernel code "well enough" to maintain it in face of hardware changes and other external requirements.

I don't mean anything by "strong suspicions", you do: "I have a strong suspicion that Deis will live on after March under stewardship of new leadership from the community."

It seems you're implying someone is going to pick it up and offer a level of support that will justify it as a viable option. I don't have insider information to make that judgment but maybe you do.

I'm not making any judgment on its technical merits or the reasons that let Deis to sunset it.

[yebyen]

OK, fair. It's still worth a look! That was my point. If you compare it to other alternatives and find it to be the best thing, it would be a shame to put it on the shelf instead when there are no alternatives that are as technically strong.

If you don't look at it, you have no basis to compare it to the alternatives that you're evaluating. I would rather pick a really good solution than a supported one. If I have to pick a supported solution, then I would rather at minimum compare it to a good one, so I can be honest about what shortcomings it has. It is telling that most of the recommendations in this thread are Helm.

Helm is great, but it ain't no Deis.

Deis Workflow is rock-solid and worth evaluating, even if support is a requirement for you. Other competing solutions are not as good. I don't even know any other that are really comparable. Maybe OpenShift, but it is not "really K8S"

[xkarga00]

> Maybe OpenShift, but it is not "really K8S"

Can you elaborate more? What makes you think that this is true?

[yebyen]

It has incompatible resource types. They built OpenShift to handle authorization and permissions before Kubernetes RBAC was fully baked. So there are OpenShift solutions that don't exist on K8S, and vice-versa.

The BuildConfig and ImageStream for starters.

It's not a substantive difference that makes OpenShift much harder to learn, but it is a difference that means "if RedHat decides to 'Deis' OpenShift," we're stuck rebuilding everything for the better-supported K8S-proper mainline tree, and large parts of our tooling are going to need to be replaced because Kubernetes does not do ImageStream, and OpenShift does not do Helm.

Maybe the chances of that happening are low, but there are enough differences that from my understanding, I should not ever expect Kubernetes projects to be directly portable to OpenShift without modification (or vice-versa.)

It's also very expensive for an open-source project. Granted you are paying for support and cloud hardware, but I can take Kubernetes and spin it up anywhere. Try installing RedHat OpenShift onto arbitrary releases of CoreOS, Debian, and Amazon Linux like you might be able to do with kubeadm or kops.

That was one of the core promises of Kubernetes, to run anywhere that you can run Docker. My experiences with OpenShift were anything but that. (If I want to run OpenShift Origin, I'll be setting up a latest release of Fedora or RHEL to do it on, I guess.)

I will take Deis for my dev environments at least, because I think the chances that Kubernetes core devs are going to break the APIs in a way that makes it impossible for Deis to be kept alive by a ragtag bunch that figured out how the CI scripts work, pretty much nil. I can take Deis to any cloud provider on any operating system that can do Kubernetes, or onto my own metal (or on Minikube, or on Localkube, or ...)

You get the point by now... Kubernetes brings an ecosystem of options, and OpenShift narrows the scope and range of that ecosystem substantially.

When Deis v1 was EOL'ed, I got into a bit of an argument on HN with Bacongobbler about whether Deis v2 was a different product or not. I argued that it was, because it runs on a different platform now (K8S) and does not support running on the old platform anymore (Fleet).

Technically not true because you can run K8S on Fleet, and Deis v2 on that. But for a sysadmin, it was different, because I knew the rules about making Deis v1 with Fleet "High-Availability" and the rules were all different for Kubernetes, so I argued that it was different.

But for a user, the APIs are all compatible, and they may even bring API integrations such as deisdash.com with them to the "new" platform. (Deisdash is the only API integration for Deis that I am aware of, but when Deis v1 was EOL and Deis v2 was production-ready, you could use Deisdash with either.)

I've now fully eschewed Deis v1 (my old place of employment still has one standing, but it runs such a small amount of infrastructure that I could replace it with a severely less sophisticated setup and nobody would notice until it failed.) I'm on Workflow now, and I have approximately no regrets about it. I can take it anywhere that I can take helm and K8s.

I'll be looking forward to see what the Deis/Azure team bring out in the future that's going to obviate the need for me to be on unsupported EOL Workflow. Because according to Deis team lead @gabrtv, they are still just getting warmed up:

https://twitter.com/gabrtv/status/891096179089342464

[yebyen]

> I'd advise against choosing core infrastructure components ...

To be fair, I'd advise against choosing core infrastructure components based solely on a recommendation in an HN thread.

You should do your own research, obviously! I am comfortable enough with the Deis brand to say that it is a solution that does not even remotely rival the Linux Kernel in terms of complexity. Kubernetes has API stability, and you can count on APIs that are not marked "alpha" or "beta" to be around in the same form as long as it is still called Kubernetes.

Deis is made of small, totally understandable parts. It is not a monolith that you need to weigh heavily in your conscience whether to allow it into your infrastructure, in case you can't find support for it at some future date... you can mix and match components, if you find one part does something that your infrastructure was lacking!

I'd be glad to elaborate on my strong suspicions, but tl;dr the last few days I've been scrambling to figure out how I'll get my issues resolved, now that the Microsoft dev team I had working on them for free is going somewhere else.

I've been raising every issue I can think of so I can get eyes on it before it's too late. And so far, I don't see anything that I think I can't solve for myself. My short list of issues, I've been able to solve almost all on my own! I have a lot of knowledge about Deis, I've been around for a few years, but I am not a core dev and I have never contributed any commits.

My impression of the codebase is that it is uncompromising and extremely comprehensible. There are at least about half a dozen of us that it appears will be sticking around; we don't want to undermine Deis and Microsoft's EOL notice, because "no breaking changes" will make our job easier as maintainers into the future. The first person to say the wrong thing, may wind up responsible for a fork. It is a delicate time, but I hope to convince some people that it should not be completely discounted because of this news.

But I don't really know what's going to happen to the project. It could be that development continues on Raspberry Pi and the project loses its focus on cloud platforms, because it's cheaper to do the development on RPI. And that might be fine for cloud users (or, it could be fine until your cloud provider makes a breaking update! More likely I think than K8s breaking APIs that are marked stable.)

[yebyen]

I'm still waiting for anyone who downvoted to tell me what better alternatives to Deis Workflow exist. I would rather have a better solution than a supported one.

[mdekkers]

I'm still waiting for anyone who downvoted to tell me what better alternatives to Deis Workflow exist

The kind of people that prefer to downvote you because you said something they didn´t agree with are by definition not the kind of people that would have anything meaningful to contribute. Downvoting on HN is increasingly getting in the way of the utility of HN. I used to come here for the interesting discussions. I don´t bother that much anymore.

[yebyen]

Yeah I see a lot of downvotes, but I must be getting almost as many upvotes because I don't seem to be gray text...

Drive-by downvoters definitely bother me! I try not to let it bother me though.