Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ManBeardPc 869 days ago
My experience with Kubernetes has been mostly bad. I always see an explosion of complexity and there is something that needs fixing all the time. The knowledge required comes on top of the existing stack.

Maybe I'm biased and just have the wrong kind of projects, but so far everything I encountered could be built with a simple tech stack on virtual or native hardware. A reverse proxy/webserver, some frontend library/framework, a backend, database, maybe some queues/logs/caching solutions on any server Linux distribution. Maintenance is minimal, dirt cheap, no vendor lock-in and easy to teach. Is everyone building the next Amazon/Netflix/Goole and needs to scale to infinity? I feel there is such a huge amount of software and companies that will never require or benefit from Kubernetes.

1 comments

Company CTOs in my experience get sold very easily the idea of infinite scalability. In practice not many companies reach that point, but many that go down this road have to build on top of dozens of layers of compute/networking abstractions that only few experts on the team can manage, if any, competently.

I think the cost of self-managed Linux VMs and monoliths is smaller than the cloud vendors made it seem.

Containers are nice when you have to deal with a language like Python and it's packaging ecosystem, but when Go/Rust/.Net/etc binaries are placed in containers as well... I think sight of what we're trying to solve in real life has been kind of lost.

Monoliths are so much easier for smaller teams. No additional tooling needed, no service discovery, instead of networks calls you have function calls, can share resources, etc. Much less overhead as well, so you may not even need to scale. The amount of requests a single Go/Rust server can handle on a dedicated machine is insanely high with modern hardware.