[bsaul]

recently facing the dilemma of choosing between k8s vs something more basic.

Features that seemed to be advocating for k8s were not server provisionning, but instead :

log management, easy setup of blue/green & canary deployment, not having to restart a vm upon new code deployment, etc...

How would you do those things as easily with other techs ?

[reacharavindh]

This is the proper reason why so many orgs are considering/using something as complex as Kubernetes. It is not such a easy comparison of 10 servers running K8S versus 6 servers running KVM. There is more to it. Once you do config management, safe deployment mechanisms, observability setup, network management, secrets, RBAC, identity mgmt etc the "just a few servers running Linux" setup looks almost as complicated as Kubernetes and you've created a bespoke setup that only you know how to operate. If you go the Kubernetes route, sure there are bells and whistles that are not needed for your use case, but it standardises the operations such that you can hire a new team member and supply K8S documentation to them and expect them to do things in your infra setup.

It is a choice. I have personally moved on from the "Kubernetes is never a good choice over running things yourselves" camp.

[sofixa]

Nomad all the way. It's much easier and lighter than Kubernetes, but it does 3/4 of what Kubernetes does. The ecosystem is much lighter but depending on your needs it could be entirely sufficient.

I've written about Nomad vs k8s on my blog if that might interest you:

https://atodorov.me/2021/02/27/why-you-should-take-a-look-at...

And I've also written about some common things, like Traefik for ingress, Loki for logs, etc. to supplement the pretty complete Hashicorp tutorials.

[zorr]

It's all trade-offs. k8s is feature-rich, flexible and configurable but that also means high complexity. Simpler tools might not tick all the feature boxes.

As long as your applications follow 12-factor principles it shouldn't be too hard to move between different orchestration tools and you can pick the one that best suits your needs.

[gowthamgts12]

why don't you consider nomad[0] in your evaluations. i think it should fit your requirement.

[0] - https://www.nomadproject.io

[Jedd]

Can second this recommendation. We're running OpenShift and Nomad clusters - the former makes my eyes bleed, and the latter I can mostly get my head around. (Note that I'm not involved in operating either of those platforms.)

You'll still get layer-upon-layer of abstraction - for example Consul for key-value and service discovery, Traefik for load balancing, Terraform to build up the service discovery rules, etc - but it feels somewhat more intentful, less boilerplate.

[username_my1]

aws elastic beanstalk

all what a modern web app needs out of the box with 1 day to learn instead of years... and the best? you don't have to modify your code to work on it, ie environment and code are separate.

[notanzaiiswear]

And if they don't like your politics, they simply pull the plug.

[Cthulhu_]

You mean morally indefensible politics and misinformation propaganda? Oh no. Anyway.

I mean these politics are pushed by rich Americans and foreign interests, surely they have the means to start their own hosting platform. It's the same that advocate in favor of businesses rejecting customers because of free market.

[BackBlast]

This doesn't seem to be as easily defined as you say. The new AWS group is more or less targeted at "avoid bad press" rather than "indefensible politics", whatever that is. Twitter mobs seem to be quite fickle to me and can just as easily eat their own as their usual fare. News outlets aren't a lot better, often following big enough gripe fests and piling on like the rest.

It's not just based on particular politics. It can be any behavioral screw-up done by you or any employee, at any point in your life, real or perceived, that crosses the current cultural expectations. The surface area of risk is ridiculously huge.

[notanzaiiswear]

It gives activists another angle of attack on your business. If they can create enough of a scandal, Amazon might drop you to avoid bad press.

[BackBlast]

I don't use any cloud service that isn't available at other vendors. This isn't my primary reason, but it is on the radar.

[notanzaiiswear]

I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't be free to do that. Just that you should think twice about trusting them with your business.

No further comment on the specific political content - those sensibilities can change. Can your business adapt quickly enough?