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Kubernetes is NOT a container orchestrator (flanksource.com)
18 points by moshloop 2311 days ago
4 comments
throwaway3157 2311 days ago
Click bait title. The point of this article is that Kubernetes is indeed an orchestrator, but "so much more". However, it's mostly a bunch of random conversational pieces, like mentioning the slack channel has 90k users
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moshloop 2311 days ago
The size of the slack channel alludes to the size of the eco-system, and the scale at which Kubernetes is solving not just technical coding problems, but non-technical communication problems
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vkazanov 2311 days ago
How about "Kubernetes as a complexity generator"? :-)
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moshloop 2311 days ago
Kubernetes isn't the source of complexity - it is the problem domain of building and operating distributed systems that are fundamentally and essentially complex.

Compare the complexity of Kubernetes to Openstack - the next most similar project in the same problem space, and you will find Kubernetes is actually pretty simple.

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bauerd 2311 days ago
OpenStack and Kubernetes serve different purposes. Despite the article, Kubernetes at its core really is a container orchestrator. OpenStack is a collection of software you'd use for running a mini-AWS on bare metal infrastructure.
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moshloop 2311 days ago
OpenStack and Kubernetes don't serve different purposes - they just solve them differently.

Both fundamentally are about abstracting the way in which infrastructure is managed.

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bauerd 2310 days ago
Well you can't run OpenStack on Kubernetes, but the other way round works. They target infrastructure at different levels of abstraction
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eldelshell 2311 days ago
I think you meant OpenShift. OpenStack works with full fledge VMs not containers.
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moshloop 2311 days ago
I meant OpenStack.

Kubernetes works with fully-fledged VM's as well - See Kubevirt

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MoroCode 2311 days ago
My question is then what counts as a container orchestrator. Not to shit on the article but why over-complicate the definition of an already over-engineered system
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moshloop 2311 days ago
You can solve container orchestration problems using Kubernetes, but you can also solve them using Swarm, Nomad and Mesos.

Kubernetes is the most popular, precisely because it is not over-engineered, the level of engineering matches the problem domain.

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parvenu74 2311 days ago
Is there even a viable alternative to Kubernetes at this point? For that matter, is there an alternative to YAML for defining Kubernetes setups?
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mads 2311 days ago
I find that nomad is actually a very good alternative.
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moshloop 2311 days ago
Sure, https://github.com/Azure/draft doesn't require any YAML and deploys onto Kubernetes.

I remember someone also doing a demo of configuring your kubernetes deployment on your Java objects directly.

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eldelshell 2311 days ago
OpenShift of course. And no, there are no alternatives AFAIK for the setups.
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lytedev 2311 days ago
I believe there are a few viable k8s alternatives depending on your requirements. We use Jsonnet currently, but CUElang looks neat as well.
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