[bavell]

Great article, I've learned many of these firsthand and agree with their conclusions. I have some more reading to do on PDBs!

K8s is a powerful and complex tool that should only be used when needed. IMO you should be wary of using it if you're trying to host less than a dozen applications - unless it's for learning/testing purposes.

It's a complex beast with many footguns for the uninitiated. For those with the right problems, motivations and skillsets, k8s is the holy grail of scale and automation.

[toshk]

What would you suggest as an alternative, simpler form for docker deploy, running and managing? Docker-compose?

[ghaff]

What do you mean by docker hosting? Kubernetes (and other related tools) are container orchestration/management tools. As if often the case in the management space, if you're just running at small scale, you may not need anything beyond container command line tools and some scripts. You could also use Ansible to automate.

[toshk]

Thanks we are running a few node servers, we now deploy command line. Dev we use docker-compose. But we are looking for a way to easily share our servers. We developed it for Amsterdam open source. Around 20-30 cities are in line to start using it. Doesn't have to be scalable, or have high availibility. Ease of deployment, easy way to update and basic security. All sysadmins are pushing for kubernetes, although for the big cities it makes sense, it really starting to feel like an overkill for small cities who will run 1-3 non-critical sites with 0.5-5k users p/m. Heard a lot about ansible, will look into it, thanks!

[ghaff]

So it sounds as if you've sort of outgrown the command line but aren't sure you want to jump in on self-managed Kubernetes. You'd have to look at the costs but maybe some sort of managed offering would work for you. It could scale up for larger sites but would be fairly simple for smaller ones--especially with standardized configurations.

You could look at the big cloud providers directly. OpenShift [I work at Red Hat] also has a few different types of managed offerings.

[watermelon0]

I'm not necessarily agreeing with you. Kubernetes really is a complex beast, and I wouldn't recommend self-hosting it for companies that don't have people that can focus solely on managing it.

I would also not recommend it for hosting a WordPress site, or a simple CRUD app.

However, when you get to the level where autoscaling is required, and where you are deploying multiple services, managed Kubernetes is not such a bad idea.

Using EKS (especially with Fargate) on AWS is not much harder than figuring out and properly utilizing EC2/ASG/ELB. GKE or DigitalOcean offerings seem to be even easier to use and understand.