I think it is a realistic expectation. Think of EC2 in 2006. Getting started was almost immediate if you already had an Amazon account. You downloaded a CLI tool and your credentials, and started a VM. Prior to this, it might have seemed unrealistic to provide such a streamlined experience.
I would love to see the same done for Kubernetes. What I want is a kubeconfig file that links me to a paid account somewhere, and whenever I run `kubectl apply -f foo.yml`, I pay by the millisecond for whatever resources get created. Zero ops for me the customer, and all the complexity will be on the side of the company offering this service.
I think Okteto is an example of what you're describing. (This is for K8s, I just learned about this service yesterday and it does what you're describing, kind of.)
okteto.com
I'm not sure this is relevant, but it's a great example of a service that has a tutorial, that covers multiple use cases, and lasts less than about 2 minutes, leaving you with a pretty clear understanding of what else you're meant to do.
> I would love to see the same done for Kubernetes. What I want is a kubeconfig file that links me to a paid account somewhere, and whenever I run `kubectl apply -f foo.yml`, I pay by the millisecond for whatever resources get created.
Have you tried digitalocean's kubernetes offering? It takes about 10 clicks to create a cluster and download a config.
What I'm envisioning wouldn't involve creating a cluster. As soon as I set up the account, I could download the kubeconfig and start creating resources. The cluster would be invisible to me, aside from the namespace I was given.
I have built this on Digital Ocean's dropletkit API client gem for Ruby, but without the "we send you a bill" part.
Two or three clicks to kubeconfig, then your cluster is deleted in about 4 days. I call it Hephynator and it's not open source yet, but I would definitely consider it. (This model works for me, because I received Open Source credits from DO. :thanks:)
I don't know how much that helps, but DigitalOcean's built-in interface to creating clusters is about that easy. It's nicer than my stripped-down version. Things like "how long until your cluster is ready" -- I didn't take care of that in my DropletKit client, but DOK8s does in their web interface.
My driver to build this little widget was the fact that their Kubeconfig files that are issued by DigitalOcean's interface by default expire after 7 days, so I either needed a way to be sure that my OSS contributors who I hand these clusters out to, could get another kubeconfig when it expired, but not wait for me... or, their cluster would not live as long as the expiration date, which seemed to be a more reasonable economy-driven decision.
I decided to make the clusters last 4 days and then delete themselves. It was a fun project, and now we can use it to make more fun Open Source.
I should open source it. It's a very simple rails app. It does exactly what you describe, I just push "Create cluster" and then confirm some parameters, then get a "Download Kubeconfig" button which is the last step where you have to interact with anyone other than K8s API. It needs to be made pretty, before I'd consider publishing it. But for now, it does the job and my team is using it fruitfully :)
I don't think he meant 30 secs to "evaluate" the service. But you should be able to get enough from a pitch page to know whether or not it would be worth clicking through to "Getting Started" and installing the prereqs.
I would love to see the same done for Kubernetes. What I want is a kubeconfig file that links me to a paid account somewhere, and whenever I run `kubectl apply -f foo.yml`, I pay by the millisecond for whatever resources get created. Zero ops for me the customer, and all the complexity will be on the side of the company offering this service.