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by JackRabbitSlim 2209 days ago
I get the feeling K8 is the modern PHP. Software that's easy to pick up and use without complete understanding and get something usable. Even if its not efficient and results in lots of technical debt.

And like PHP, it will be criticised with the power of hind sight but will continue to be used and power vast swaths of the internet.
2 comments
iso-8859-1 2209 days ago
But languages are easy, there is the whole field of PL theory to draw from. If you're randomly throwing things together like Lerdorf was, there's a missed opportunity.

But what is the universally regarded theory that k8s contradicts? I don't think there is one.

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p_l 2209 days ago
In fact, I'd say that k8s is unusually heavily stepped in high-brow theories from both engineering and AI space. Just not necessarily ones that enjoy hype right now.

The storage of apiserver essentially works as distributed Blackboard in a "Blackboard System", with every controller being an agent in such a system. Meanwhile the agents themselves approach their tasks from control theory areas - oft used comparison is with PID controllers.

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JackRabbitSlim 2209 days ago
Give me 10 years and hind-sight and I'll have your answer.
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pyrophane 2209 days ago
I don't think this is right. The reason I say that is because for the most part, teams new to k8s aren't building and managing their own clusters, they are using a managed solution. In that case, an application deployment only need be a few dozen lines of yaml. Most teams aren't really going to be building deep into k8s, and it shouldn't be hard to deploy your containers to some other managed solution.
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JackRabbitSlim 2209 days ago
Fair point, but then plenty of people were using hosted solutions for their naive PHP apps too. Managed solutions don't prevent poor/improper configuration in either case.

The managed hosts and/or their tools probably helped negate damage/resolve issues quicker. However I think that the idea that "all you need is a couple of dozen lines of yaml and a managed provider" is exactly why it's headed down a similar path.

For a real world examples just look at every improperly configured S3 bucket leaking data. Every private key accidentally posted to github from a careless 'git add -a'. Every API that doesn't properly check auth. None of these are within the purview of a managed hosts responsibility.

I'm not even against K8 in any of this. Just making the observation that - like PHP - it is empowering entire groups of people to do things they otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

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