[atombender]

Less than 15 employees. Several products, two teams, <= 20 nodes.

We migrated our stuff from DigitalOcean around 2018. At the time, we briefly toyed with the notion of self-hosting Kubernetes on DO, but it's complex to manage, and we don't have any dedicated ops staff. GKE is significantly easier to manage.

At that time we migrated, the things you mentioned weren't available/mature, I think. Even today, I'd choose Kubernetes over a complex mishmash of different systems. I like the unified, extensible ops model. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I wish all of GCP could be managed as Kubernetes objects.

[briangrant]

Re. managing GCP as Kubernetes resources: https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview

[atombender]

That's very cool, thanks! Note that this allows selectively creating Kubernetes resources backed by GCP resources. Looks like it will not automatically sync everything that already exists, which seems like a missed opportunity.

[praveenperera]

But DigitalOcean has managed K8s now: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/

[atombender]

DigitalOcean did not have Kubernetes then. Are you suggesting we should spend 6-12 man months migrating back?

[tie_]

How about contracting an ops-oriented person for a month that would do the migration for you? Where do those cost functions intersect?

[atombender]

Would never happen. Just the amount of time needed to dedicate to onboarding a temporary contractor would be really disruptive to the developers, not to mention the disruptive effect of the technical migration — databases to move over, persistent volumes to copy, DNS to repoint, lots of downtime, etc. There's a good reason companies don't switch clouds often.

[tie_]

If it takes more than a month to migrate a 20-node K8s cluster, then that's a red flag. Too much tech debt or a strong vendor lock-in? Either deserves attention.

[atombender]

Doing the migration might take a few late evenings; deploying all our apps and Helm charts to a new cluster takes just a few commands. Learning what needs to be migrated, deciding on how the configuration should look on the destination end of it, and designing a detailed plan and checklist for the whole process is the big task. Adding the onboarding of someone who's never seen the inside of your company and you're talking about a longer, more disruptive process. Tech debt isn't a factor here.

[praveenperera]

No my mistake DOKS came out late 2018.

I had been using it since May 2018 but it didn't come out of early access till December.