[doctor_eval]

I’m sceptical of this article. I’m an indy dev using K8s at vultr (VKS) and it’s absolutely simplified my life.

The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s, but if I do that, I now have to manage an entire operating system. I have to make sure the OS is up to date, and balance all the nuances this entails, especially balancing downtimes, and recovery from upgrades. Major OS upgrades are hard, and pretty much guarantee downtime unless you’re running multiple instances in which case how are you managing them?

Contrast to VKS where, with much less effort, OS upgrades are rolled out to nodes with no downtime to my app. Yes, getting to this point takes a little bit of effort, but not much. And yes, I have multiple redundant VPS, which is more expensive, but that’s a feature.

K8s is perhaps overly verbose, and like all technologies it has a learning curve, but im gonna go out on a limb here and say that I’ve found running a managed K8s service like VKS is way easier than managing even a single Debian server, and provides a pile of functionality that is difficult or impossible to achieve with a single VPS.

And the moment you have more than one VPS, it needs to be managed, so you’re back at needing some kind of orchestration.

The complexity of maintaining a unix system should not be underestimated just because you already know how to do it. K8s makes my life easier because it does not just abstract away the underlying node operating system, it obviates it. In doing so, it brings its own complexities, but there’s nothing I miss about managing operating systems. Nothing.

[stekern]

(Author here)

The main focus of the post is to highlight some of the long-term risks and consequences of standardizing around Kubernetes in an org. If you've done a proper evaluation, and still think Kubernetes makes sense for you, then it's probably a sound decision. But I think many skip the evaluation step or do it hastily. The post is more targeted towards organizations with at least a handful of employees. What works for an indy dev does not necessarily scale and work for SMBs or larger orgs - those are very different contexts.

> The article suggests just using EC2 instead of K8s

Not quite. I suggest strongly considering using managed services when it makes sense for your organization. The equivalent of k8s in terms of managed services would be Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) as the control plane, perhaps with AWS Fargate as the compute runtime.

(I wouldn't really call EC2 a managed service - it's more in the territory of Infrastructure as a Service)

[doctor_eval]

I may have misread ECS as EC2 and I apologise for that.

But the argument you make should certainly be applied to other managed services. AWS generally has opaque pricing, and significant hidden complexity - are you really going to just subscribe to ecs and fargate? Or are you subscribing to a bunch of other complexities like CloudWatch, IAM, EBS, etc etc? If I want to control costs then do I also need some third party service? How many IOPS does my database need, anyway?

I’m not an AWS user, because every time I’ve looked at it I’ve come away shaking my head at how complex everything is, and how much vendor specific technology I need to learn just to do something simple.

And, having run organisations with more than a handful of employees, if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that simplicity is a virtue.

In fact, the last company I was involved with went all-in on AWS which involved formal training for everyone, very high costs, and multiple dedicated administrators. My part of the business pre dated that decision, and we did well over 10x the throughput with a single dedicated ops expert, using our own gear, orchestrated with docker-swarm. Our costs were literally 10% of the cost of AWS for the other part of the business, including amortisation of the hardware, and that’s before all the extra training and operational costs of AWS.

Today, it’s far easier to run K8s than it was to run swarm back then. So quite honestly, if you’re an Indy developer like me, K8s is almost a no brainer, and if you’re a mid sized SaaS shop, AWS is just a really great example of spending tens of thousands of dollars a month to say you’re running in AWS.