[throwaway894345]

I've always felt that Kubernetes isn't appropriate for most businesses to use directly, but rather it's a platform for simpler platforms--someone like Heroku would build on top of Kubernetes and expose a much simpler interface for their users so they don't have to think about SSL, DNS, logging, load balancing, auto-scaling, etc. Alternatively, maybe the problem is solved with "distributions" of Kubernetes analogous to Linux distros--preconfigured Kubernetes installations so you don't have to figure out how to configure your own Kubernetes service (arguably this is also what cloud providers give us with their managed k8s offerings). I'm curious to hear what others think.

[linkdd]

100% agree. Kubernetes alone is just a """framework""" to describe your infrastructure, definitely not an "end-user product".

That is why in many businesses there is an OPS team managing the Kubernetes and providing tools like Cert-Manager, Istio, ... and the rest of the company who just use what the OPS team made.

Right now, everyone is building its own distro, proving IMHO the need for it.

[throwaway894345]

Well said!

[theptip]

Lots of PaaS offerings have been doing this for a long time, RedHat OpenShift being the original one; they contributed a lot of 1.0 k8s code and provided a lot of key early architectural feedback by implementing a PaaS using k8s. Another early one was Deis, who were at the first KubeCon.

All this is to say that you're at very least certainly half-correct, in that k8s is a very flexible tool that can be used to build a very simple, elegant, and ergonomic PaaS.

I'm not sure I agree that it's inappropriate for most businesses though, unless you think that only a PaaS like Heroku is appropriate for most businesses; the analogy I'd suggest is "Heroku vs. running your own VMs" circa 2010. Heroku is great for getting started, and lets you move fast by abstracting away a bunch of infra. But it's also restrictive; you can't pick and choose your components freely. As you grow past a certain point you'll almost certainly need the flexibility (or just cost-effectiveness) that you get from running your own infrastructure.

K8s is an improvement here because you can run a managed cluster on something like GKE, which takes away most of the operational toil, while still giving you a lot of flexibility on what components / pieces to include. The k8s domain API does a great job of abstracting away true infra concerns like volumes, compute, scheduling, load-balancing, etc, while making it really easy to package, use, and iterate on the stuff that sits on top of that infrastructure.

I'd probably not encourage a seed-stage startup to use k8s unless you're very familiar with the tool; a PaaS like Heroku would likely be more appropriate. However at the point that you'd usually graduate to running your own VMs (wherever that is on your own company's developmental path), I'd say that using k8s is now a better choice.

[throwaway894345]

I think I generally agree. Maybe saying "most businesses" is a poor word choice; I don't really have the breadth of experience to speak for the majority of the industry; however, I do strongly suspect that a lot of companies are employing an ops team to wrestle with Kubernetes when their needs could probably be met by a PaaS, and I think this will only get more true as the first generation of PaaS-on-k8s arrive on the market in mature form. I generally agree with this:

> However at the point that you'd usually graduate to running your own VMs (wherever that is on your own company's developmental path), I'd say that using k8s is now a better choice.

However, even then there are intermediate options between VMs and full-on k8s, such as AWS ECS/Fargate, a Kubernetes distro, or managed Kubernetes offering (e.g., GKE) which give me the flexibility to interact with k8s, but they come with sane, pre-configured (or easily configured) solutions for logging, monitoring, ingress, load balancing, upgrades, etc.

[joshmanders]

That's exactly what I am doing with https://primcloud.com :)

[throwaway894345]

This seems really cool; I was poking around, but half of the links in your footer are broken (presumably placeholders for future pages?).

[joshmanders]

Yes sorry, I had a simple splash landing page up but people were asking for more info, so I put this up while I continue building the infra/platform.

I will over time expand on the content, but I'm focusing on the platform itself over marketing stuff.

[andendau]

Do you support on-premises kubernetes?

[joshmanders]

I'm still building so I currently don't. Kubernetes is just a tool I use to deploy my customers sites on, it's not the selling point.

I do however have plans of supporting enterprise by packaging a version of the app into an on-prem deployment system so you can just deploy your own kubernetes cluster and install the app and have your own enterprise version of Primcloud.

[erohead]

https://kubesail.com offers the exact service you describe!

[erulabs]

Thanks for the shout-out! We’re trying to be like an “open-Heroku” - back when I worked on OpenStack it was called “the open cloud” and no one knew what we were on about - open stack was enterprise as enterprise gets!

Our goal is to make a Heroku-ish platform for getting an app online - but one that doesn’t hold you over a barrel later on. You can even host from a spare home server :)

(Disclosure: I’m the CTO)

[OJFord]

Do you still expose the k8s bits?

I'm interested in/have previously given up on a product where the control plane is managed for me, I can join the cluster with bare metal nodes, and then it's just Kubernetes.

[erulabs]

Yep - we expose the Kubernetes API (and add mutating controllers to help automate some of its actions).

Right now we don't do "hosted control plane", rather - you can either use our hosted clusters where you have namespace-level access (so you still get to use Kubernetes, just not all of the resources, for example, no `Nodes`), or you can attach your own cluster to our UI (with the advantage that we can setup ingress and forward traffic to you, which is perfect for a home-hosting setup).

Hosted control plane is something im watching closely though - I'd really love to offer that as a service, but since we're small, we're trying to focus hard on a core offering. Will be considered in the future though!

[kutorio]

kubesail has really nice UI for an hosted option. Another alternative I found is https://kalm.dev/, which is open sourced and geared towards configuring a heroku on top of a k8s cluster.