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by jeffbee 2140 days ago
Some of these stories (I just Googled for "kubernetes failure stories") have little to do with K8s. This one[1] is just whining that his app is slow when it runs out of CPU. That's more of a "I don't know what I'm doing" story, isn't it? Lifting the CPU rate limits in a container is not exactly a cost-free magic wand.

1: https://medium.com/omio-engineering/cpu-limits-and-aggressiv...
2 comments
yjftsjthsd-h 2140 days ago
> That's more of a "I don't know what I'm doing" story, isn't it?

Sure, but k8s is big enough that "very few people know what they're doing" is a valid argument. It's loosely like saying that git sucks because the technology is solid but it's extremely complex and hard to get a grasp on.

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jeffbee 2140 days ago
I don't think the ergonomics of k8s are anywhere near as bad as those of git. I think the perception of k8s as complex and confusing is promulgated by people who already don't understand how their process starts and runs on any given Linux box without container orchestration. Naturally these people are overwhelmed by adding k8s on top.

The article to which I linked describes itself as "a wild ride of discovery" but all that has been discovered is basic aspects of the Linux process scheduler. The author could have skipped the wild ride if they had understood Linux first.

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p_l 2140 days ago
Add to this conspicuous lack of good bottom-up description of how things mesh together, and suddenly instead of having complex system built out of simple parts people face complex system built of magic. It's a credit to k8s that you can trudge forward in the second case, but I'm too divorced from "k8s newbie" to reliably check what's the current "newbie introduction" :/
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the_af 2140 days ago
I cannot speak for the article you linked to, but the Zalando guys (from the "failure stories" talk) seem pretty experienced and do seem to know what they are speaking about...
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the_af 2140 days ago
This is closer to what I meant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sDTB4eV4F8

Still not the exact talk, but I think it's from the same guys. I remember they explained how with K8s, the "surface area" of problems grows almost uncontrollably. You have all the problems of doing things manually (or at least, when things go wrong you must have a very good grasp of them), plus all the problems of K8s.

(Do note they are not arguing against K8s, just pointing out its multiple pitfalls)

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