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by busterarm 1809 days ago
K8s is an enormously complex piece of software and I haven't met a great many people who "know" it inside and out.

Basic concepts and how to write a job/service/ingress, sure. Knowing the internals and how to operate it? I'd say that's only for specialists. Most people don't need to know what a Finalizer is or does. Most people aren't going to write operators.

It is a multi-year investment of time to deeply understand this tool and it's not necessary for everyone.
2 comments
pgwhalen 1808 days ago
The same could be said for the linux kernel, and yet we still run all of our software on it.
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busterarm 1808 days ago
Except with the kernel, you only have to be familiar with the system calls and you don't need a team of people just to run, maintain and upgrade the kernel.

That and it tries to make breaking changes on the timescale of decades rather than every other minor release (so, once or twice a year?).

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pgwhalen 1808 days ago
> Except with the kernel, you only have to be familiar with the system calls

I think it's safe to assume that any non-trivial use of linux involves non-default configuration.

> you don't need a team of people just to run, maintain and upgrade the kernel.

My relatively small company employed linux admins before we adopted (on prem) kubernetes. Their work has changed a bit since since then, but it isn't meaningfully more laborious.

I assume that less effort is required for cloud kubernetes offerings.

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busterarm 1808 days ago
My whole point is that they're not really comparable from a level of effort perspective, despite claims.

Hosted Kubernetes isn't significantly easier either, as every host is offering you different things as "Kubernetes" and has different ways that you will need to manually intervene to overcome problems.

I'm only telling you this from experience, being years down the rabbit hole already.

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pgwhalen 1808 days ago
I also speak from experience, from an organization that has had a lot of success with kubernetes. Perhaps we're in the sweet spot where our workload is suited for it but there still isn't a huge amount of complexity in maintaining it.
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alexhwoods 1808 days ago
Agreed. I think overtime we'll just get more abstracted away from it. GKE Autopilot, for example.

I think you still have to understand the lego block in your hand though, so you can combine it well with the other parts of your system.

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