[botskonet]

I hadn't considered the benefits for dev/local instances...

I've known about Kubernetes for some time, but my current job never deploys anything that Kubernetes could improve, so I put it aside and hoped to someday get a chance to toy with it.

I've setup vagrant images pre-loaded with our app for several non-developers to use locally but it sounds like Kubernetes would be a far better way to manage those as well as staging servers.

Unfortunately my current company is 100% against third-party hosting/involvement so I couldn't even use it for staging - our stagings servers are Windows-based, ancient, and internal...

[theptip]

For me (small startup) this is the killer feature of k8s. I'm not operating at a scale where "cluster scheduling" is a thing I need to care about, though self-healing and load-balanced services are nice.

To be able to stand up an exact copy of my application on a dev machine, or even better in a review app per-branch (complete with DNS entry and TLS cert) is incredibly valuable. You can run through essentially all of the deploy pipeline before even merging, including SSL config tests etc.

[bonesss]

In addition to the dev benefits, there is also a built in cloud scaling story and strategy.

It's not like every app needs that kind of robustness, but there is a certain calming security in knowing that if any part of your Kubernetes deployed app actually needs to go "web scale", or someone asks about 100 times the users you have ever considered, that the answer is straightforward and reasonably pre-configured.

[cookiecaper]

Kubernetes can't run the local images for your devs (Kubernetes must operate over a cluster; minikube spins up a virtual one). You're just thinking of containers.

I saw another comment that did this just a minute ago. Is k8s-hysteria getting so out of control that it's consuming Docker whole? Seems like it may be.

----- EDITING IN RESPONSE TO GOUGGOUG -----

HN's limitation on my post rate has kicked in. Response to gouggoug follows this note, since I'm not allowed to post it.

This rate limit was originally installed to make me stop speaking against the kool-aid Kubernetes hivemind and now it's filling its purpose quite well. See this thread for the original infraction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14453705 . After the fact, dang has justified the rate limit by saying I was engaging in a flame war. Read the offending thread and judge for yourselves.

Remember, YC doesn't want you to ask if you need Kubernetes or not. They just want you to use it. If someone on HN says otherwise too frequently, they'll rate limit that person's account, as they've done to mine.

Doesn't matter if you have 10 years of history on the site. Doesn't matter if you have 10k+ karma. Only matters that you're counteracting the narrative that Google is paying a lot of money to push.

No matter how frilly and new-age someone makes themselves out to be, people only have so much tolerance for argument when there's money, power, and prestige on the line. HN is no exception. There's an inverse correlation between the credibility of counter-arguments and the urgency of the situation; crazy stuff won't get much retaliatory fire because most people can tell it's crazy, but non-crazy stuff that counteracts their goals will be pushed down, because most people can tell it's not crazy.

----- BEGIN RESPONSE TO GOUGGOUG -----

He says that he wants Kubernetes to replace a local Vagrant image. Kubernetes doesn't replace Vagrant. To replace Vagrant, he would want Docker, rkt, etc., not Kubernetes. Kubernetes solves a different problem. Yet he says that he wants to try Kubernetes to fix the problem that Kubernetes doesn't fix.

k8s and Vagrant address wholly separate concerns (where to run things rather than how to run things). The poster I replied to is conflating Kubernetes and Docker, the underlying containers that do the actual execution.

> Maybe some less advanced users using k8s don't realize that it heavily uses docker (or rkt, or whatever container runtime you could think of), but how is that an issue?

How is it not an issue? Is it OK for developers to not know the difference between a compiler and an IDE now? A web server and a browser? A computer case and a CPU? A network card and a modem? These things are not mere details, even if they are often used together. Technical professionals who can't differentiate between these aren't just "less advanced users", they're posers.

k8s is a huge chunk of crap to throw in between you and your applications. One should, at the very least, have an accurate high-level idea of what it does before they go around telling everyone that they need it.

[gouggoug]

I'm not sure what your comment is about. I'll glance over the first 3 sentences since I'm not sure at all what you are trying to say and jump directly to the fourth one:

> Is k8s-hysteria getting so out of control that it's consuming Docker whole? Seems like it may be.

This confuses me the most. K8s and Docker are complementary technologies, not in opposition to each other. Maybe some less advanced users using k8s don't realize that it heavily uses docker (or rkt, or whatever container runtime you could think of), but how is that an issue? That doesn't mean there's a k8s-hysteria going on.