Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Volundr 843 days ago
No backups? Never do major version upgrades? Neither of these things are covered by the Postgres defaults. And even without them, I don't think I can get Ansible to install Postgres in < 10 lines. Yet all of these are covered in my ~30 line YAML running Postgres on Kubernetes. Plus of course recovering from pod and node failure, load balancing and more.

I think for most places, most of the time Kubernetes is overkill. Cloud in general isn't great bang for the buck. But speaking to your anecdote, having actually deployed these things in the past 3-4 hours to deploy a custom application, AND Postgres AND Kafka is a pretty compelling use case FOR Kubernetes. It would certainly take me a lot longer doing a proper job of it managing the system directly or using something like Ansible.

1 comments

OK, you are correct. Let's introduce nuance:

I as a dev should not waste days on this -- something I have no experience in. I can add the basic service / ingress / whatever and move on with life.

The infra / platform guys can add HA and backups later, right?

> I think for most places, most of the time Kubernetes is overkill.

Then we agree. I am not sure this app in particular was a good fit for k8s though; having it on a DO droplet + managed Postgres + managed Kafka would have taken me 1 hour, 40 minutes of which would be me cursing because I forgot to put a host name and port combo somewhere. :D

> I think for most places, most of the time Kubernetes is overkill.

True, but as you yourself said, backups and high availability are much harder on bare metal -- for devs anyway. I can do an amazing job at it because I do it at home for my stuff buuuuuuuut, it's going to take me days, maybe even two work weeks. Not a good time investment.

That's why I am resenting it when I have to do it: it's wasting my time with something that I never learn properly so I have to relearn it every time from scratch because I can't engrave it in my memory and that is because I never do it for long enough stretches of time to indeed remember it.

I already complained to my manager about it and he took it seriously, by the way. I am not raging at you or others about a deficient process in my employer's company (that I plan to help fixing, or at least mitigate somewhat). I am displeased with the fact how everyone just settled on a very, VERY low maxima -- and somehow nobody wants to rock the boat.

We can do better. We should do better. But alas, guys like myself have worked 22+ years on stuff they don't love -- and I already have burnout and hate working programming for money, which is another tragedy entirely -- and will NEVER EVER get the chance to change anything at all because I have no choice but work for the man... for now. Though at 40+ I am not sure I have the strength to manage to somehow command huge commissions for consulting or w/e else. Anyhow, off-topic.

Again, we should do better.