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by tptacek 921 days ago
We're not a K8s vendor. We're a lower-level platform than that. If all you care about is K8s, and no part of the rest of our platform is interesting to you --- the global distribution and Anycast, the fly-proxy features, the Machines API --- we're not a natural fit for what you're doing.

We were surprised at how FKS turned out, which is part of why we decided to launch it as a feature and all of why we wrote it up this way. That's all.
1 comments
verdverm 921 days ago
> We're not a K8s vendor

It might now be more accurate to say "You were not a k8s vendor", but now you are based on

> If K8s is important for your project, and that’s all that’s been holding you back from trying out Fly.io, we’ve spent the past several months building something for you.

If it's fundamentally different, maybe you shouldn't call it Kubernetes, perhaps a Kubernetes API compatible alternative?

fwiw/context, I use GKE and also many of the low-level services on GCP

Is Fly supposed to be simpler for the average developer?

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kasey_junk 921 days ago
Are any of the cloud provided managed K8s offerings just K8s under the covers? I’ve always assumed all of them shim the K8s api onto other more bespoke orchestration systems.
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verdverm 921 days ago
Most are pretty much actually k8s, though they tend to have different ways of handling the masters, my understanding is that it's the same k8s binaries and code

What I've seen is the k8s APIs working their way into other systems like cloud functions and servers, so you can use the same Yaml across vendors and products. This is further solidifying k8s APIs as an industry standard

Searching "managed kubernetes providers" is a good starting point to learn about the various offerings

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kasey_junk 921 days ago
I’ve looked extensively at the documentation for gke autopilot (a system I use extensively) and haven’t found any documentation on how they orchestrate those clusters under the covers.

I’ve always assumed it was a plugin to borg, not a different fleet orchestrator. Not to be overtly needy, but do you have a link to docs that contradicts that?

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dilyevsky 921 days ago
It is definitely not a plugin for borg. Borg is totally different api (source - i was borg sre). Afaik it’s actually vanilla k8s apiserver with some shimmed bespoke storage but it’s not really documented anywhere. You can test that fact using kubectl proxy though
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verdverm 921 days ago
- https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/clu...

- https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/kub...

Each of these has more peer pages that are pretty good too

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kasey_junk 921 days ago
You’ll note those documents are extremely careful in describing the control plane architecture to not promise you are running a stock k8s install. Which is why I’ve always assumed otherwise.

But I’ll trust the sibling comment which suggests the only bespoke component in gke is storage well enough to leave it alone.

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