[louwrentius]

What I really miss in articles like this - and I understand why to some degree - what the actual numbers would be.

Admitting that you need at least two full-time engineers working on Kubernetes I wonder how that kind of investment pay’s itself back, especially because of all the added complexity.

I desperately would like to rebuild their environment on regular VMs, maybe not even containerized and understand what the infrastructure cost would have been. And what the maintenance burden would have been as compared to kubernetes.

Maybe it’s not about pure infrastructure cost but about the development-to-production pipeline. But still.

These is just so much context that seems relevant to understand if an investment in kubernetes is warranted or not.

[jurschreuder]

This is always my exact thought with k8.

Why not just have auto-scaling servers with a CI/CD pipeline.

Seems so much easier and more convenient.

But I guess developers are just always drawn to complexity.

It's in their nature that's why they became developers in the first place.

[justinclift]

> But I guess developers are just always drawn to complexity.

Not sure why you think that?

Developers who like simplicity are a thing, and they seem to really think about how the parts of their systems interact.

[jq-r]

Having worked in two separate teams/companies with both regular VMs (that includes AWS EC2) I think it comes to the same to the number of people needed.

I would even say that there is less work with Kubernetes, but maybe that's my preference. I don't even think that you need two full time engineers working on it constantly, or more to say, if you're working on it constantly you have bigger problems but not with k8s. Sure, you need people to own it, but the work is periodical (mostly for cluster upgrades which are too frequent IMO) and in non-toxic companies there is always good work to be done.

[jonsson101]

Sorry for being unclear on this. In our case, we needed a couple of engineers who, in addition to their regular duties, would devote their time to Kubernetes as the go-to experts whenever necessary. Some weeks there was nothing to do; other weeks, particularly during cluster updates, they needed to focus exclusively on that work.

[louwrentius]

Thanks for clarification. On one hand I’m happy about you sharing this experience. On the other hand, I still feel we can’t assess the true value as it would require disclosing important information that you’d likely not be allowed to share.

[jonsson101]

Let me know what you're interested in learning more about, and I'll see what I can share. If you're looking to dive deeper into specific details, we could discuss them further in a video call or similar.

[louwrentius]

I appreciate the offer to me personally but I was thinking about another public blogpost that goes into great specifics such as requests per second, cpu load, user base, but it's so app-specific that even then it's difficult to assess.

What I do notice - and I'm not saying this is true for you (I don't know) - is that people get excited about technology like kubernetes or something equivalent, but it creates an additional burden that is totally not proportional to the benefits of said technology.

Stupid load-balancing proxy servers with a bunch of hosts behind them is extremely uninteresting and boring. But it's dead simple, so reliable and easy to scale horizontal or vertical as well.

And most of all: how much do you save by dynamically upscaling and downscaling as opposed to just keeping a static environment.

If you want to share that kind of perspective, I'd rather see a public post about it that others may benefit from.

[karolist]

k8s is simply a set of bullet proof ideas to run production grade services forcing "hope is not a strategy" as much as possible, it standardises things like rollouts, rolling restarts, canary deployments, failover etc. You can replicate it with a zoo of loosely coupled products but a monolith which you can hire for with impeccable production record and industry certs will always be preferable to orgs. It's Googles way of fighting cloud vendor lockin' when they saw they're losing market share to AWS. Only large companies need it really, a small 5 person startup will do on Digital Ocean VPS just fine with some S3 for blob storage and CDN cache.