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by FlyingSnake 1946 days ago
> If you actually took the steps of learning the basic abstractions, then for me it's really hard to see what you could still get rid of.

This argument basically sums up to "Developers just need discipline, and stop blaming the tools". While this is a sound argument on paper, the intrinsic complexity of software systems make it hard to pin the blame on developers. BTW This is the same argument Uncle Bob makes which is not so popular with many mainstream developers.

You're right about feature creep in k8s though.

2 comments

I get what you're saying, but my point is a bit more nuanced:

If your goal is to build highly reliable and available services to end users that are secure and scalable with a team of more than 10 engineers, eventually you will run into more than 50% of the concepts in Kubernetes anyway and end up re-inventing them.

Scaling up and down, node draining, finding out whether services are healthy, RBAC, resource distribution, secrets management, service hardening, introspection capabilities, explicit declaration of dependencies and endpoints and many, many more.

My point is: Sure, if your goal isn't that, it doesn't make sense to start out using Kubernetes.

But if at least eventually that's what you need, imho it's way preferable to just learn and apply well proven abstractions instead of reinventing the wheel along the way and end up with a less maintainable, capable and standardized solution you won't find anyone for maintaining.

If I hear about some of the comments here suggesting to "just spinning up docker-compose with Traefik in front" (disclaimer: I really like Traefik), then that reminds me of how some of the ops mess started that I historically had to care for.

Agreed, the truth usually lies somewhere in between and my point was we can't absolve the tools/ecosystems and put it on squarely on the devs. That definitely doesn't absolve teams and they need to do their homework before jumping on the bandwagon. K8s is great if you know what you're signing up for.
We are too proud to sometimes admit we simply „are not good enough at something”.

It’s always easier to shift the blame somewhere else.

Thats why some radical but correct concepts are so hard to push.