[cookiecaper]

Yeah, so there's the crux. If you're starting from scratch and you design something explicitly to fit within Kubernetes's constraints and demands, and those constraints and demands work well with the specific application you're designing, it will, of course, be a pleasant experience to deploy on the targeted platform. The same is true for anything else.

If you make your goal to "build something that runs great on Platform", it shouldn't be a surprise that the new thing you made runs great on it. I've been talking about Real Things That Already Exist and Run Real Businesses. That's usually what we're talking about when we talk about infrastructure and servers, and that's where we see this dangerous cargo culting where people don't realize "Just use an Operator" means "just write thousands of lines of highly-specific lifecycle management code so that Kubernetes knows how to do your things".

[justinsaccount]

Well, that's not really what I did.

It was a variation of an earlier project that I had deployed to EC2.. just on EC2 I had a mess of fragile boto/fabric stuff to get the test/prod machines provisioned and the application installed. It "worked" but I had no redundancy and deploys were hard cut-overs.. and if the new version didn't come up for whatever reason, it was just down.

I didn't do anything in the application itself to design it to run on k8s, I was able to re-use some existing test code to define things like

        livenessProbe:
          exec:
            command:
            - /app/healthcheck.py
          initialDelaySeconds: 
          periodSeconds: 300
          timeoutSeconds: 5

so, 7 lines of yaml and I had self healing and rolling deployments. I could have built this out on EC2.. probably would have taken me a few hundred lines of terraform/ansible/whatever and never worked as well. It's the kind of thing where I could have maybe gotten rolling deployments working, but I would have just ended up with an "ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of k8s"

I would have been perfectly happy to just run this whole thing on EB/heroku/lambda/whatever but the application was doing low level tcp socket stuff, not http, and almost every PaaS these days wants you to speak http.