[stuff4ben]

I really dislike this take and I see it all the time. Also I'm old and I'm jaded, so it is what it is...

Someone decides X technology is too heavy-weight and wants to just run things simply on their laptop because "I don't need all that cruft". They spend time and resources inventing technology Y to suit their needs. Technology Y gets popular and people add to it so it can scale, because no one runs shit in production off their laptops. Someone else comes along and says, "damn, technology Y is too heavyweight, I don't need all this cruft..."

"There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.”

[rfrey]

I'm a fellow geriatric and have seen the wheel turn many times. I would like to point out, though, that most cycles bring something new, or at least make different mistakes, which is a kind of progress.

A lot of times stuff gets added to simple systems because they're thought to be necessary for production systems, but as our experience grows we realize those additions were not necessary, were in the right direction but not quite right, were leaky abstractions, etc. Then when the 4-year-experienced Senior Developers reinvent the simple solution, they get stripped out - which is a good thing. When the new simple system inevitably starts to grow in complexity, it won't include the cruft that we now know was bad cruft.

Freeing the new system to discover its own bad cruft, of course. But maybe also some new good additions, which we didn't think of the first time around.

I'm not a Kubernetes expert, or even a novice, so I have no opinions on necessary and unnecessary bits and bobs in the system. But I have to think that container orchestration is a new enough domain that it must have some stuff that seemed like a good idea but wasn't, some stuff that seemed like a good idea and was, and lacks some things that seem like a good idea after 10 years of working with containers.

[motorest]

> I'm not a Kubernetes expert, or even a novice, so I have no opinions on necessary and unnecessary bits and bobs in the system. But I have to think that container orchestration is a new enough domain that it must have some stuff that seemed like a good idea but wasn't, some stuff that seemed like a good idea and was, and lacks some things that seem like a good idea after 10 years of working with containers.

I've grown to learn that the bulk of the criticism directed at Kubernetes in reality does not reflect problems with Kubernetes. Instead, it underlined that the critics are actually the problem, not Kubernetes. I mean,they mindlessly decided to use Kubernetes for tasks and purposes that made no sense, proceeded to be frustrated due to the way they misuse it, and blame Kubernetes as the scapegoat.

Think about it for a second. Kubernetes is awesome in the following scenario:

- you have a mix of COTS bare metal servers and/or vCPUs that you have lying around and you want to use it as infrastructure to run your jobs and services,

- you want to simplify the job of deploying said jobs and services to your heterogeneous ad-hoc cluster including support for rollbacks and blue-green deployments,

- you don't want developers to worry about details such as DNS and networking and topologies.

- you want to automatically scale up and down your services anywhere in your ad-hoc cluster without having anyone click a button or worry too much if a box dies.

- you don't want to be tied to a specific app framework.

If you take ad-hoc cluster of COTS hardware out of the mix, odds are Kubernetes is not what you want. It's fine if you still want to use it, but odds are you have a far better fit elsewhere.

[darkwater]

> - you don't want developers to worry about details such as DNS and networking and topologies.

Did they need to know this before Kubernetes? I've been in the trade for over 20 years and the typical product developer never cared a bit about it anyway.

> - you don't want to be tied to a specific app framework.

Yes and no. K8s (and docker images) indeed helps you in deploying more consistently different languages/frameworks but the biggest factor against this is in the end still organizational rather than purely technical. (This in an average product company with average developers, not super-duper SV startup with world-class top-notch talent where each dev is fluent in at least 4 different languages and stacks).

[motorest]

> Did they need to know this before Kubernetes?

Yes? How do you plan to configure an instance of an internal service to call another service?

> I've been in the trade for over 20 years and the typical product developer never cared a bit about it anyway.

Do you work with web services? How do you plan to get a service to send requests to, say, a database?

This is a very basic and recurrent usecase. I mean, one of the primary selling points of tools such as Docker compose is how they handle networking. Things like Microsoft's Aspire were developed specifically to mitigate the pain points of this usecase. How come you believe that this is not an issue?

[darkwater]

You just call some DNS that is provided by sysadmins/ops. The devs don't know anything about it.

[haiku2077]

I used to be that sysadmin, writing config to set that all up. It was far more labor intensive than today where as a dev I can write a single manifest and have the cluster take care of everything for me, including stuff like configuring a load balancer with probes and managing TLS certificates.

[motorest]

> You just call some DNS that is provided by sysadmins/ops.

You are the ops. There are no sysadmdins. Do you still live in the 90s? I mean, even Docker compose supports specifying multiple networks where to launch your local services. Do you ever worked with web services at all?

[ethbr1]

> Kubernetes is awesome in the following scenario: [...]

Ironically, that looks a lot like when k8s is managed by a dedicated infra team / cloud provider.

Whereas in most smaller shops that erroneously used k8s, management fell back on the same dev team also trying to ship a product.

Which I guess is reasonable: if you have a powerful enough generic container orchestration system, it's going to have enough configuration complexity to need specialists.

(Hence why the first wave of not-k8s were simplified k8s-on-rails, for common use cases)

[motorest]

> Ironically, that looks a lot like when k8s is managed by a dedicated infra team / cloud provider.

There are multiple concerns at play:

- how to stitch together this cluster in a way that it can serve our purposes,

- how to deploy my app in this cluster so that it works and meets the definition of done.

There are some overlaps between both groups, but there are indeed some concerns that are still firmly in the platform team's wheelhouse. For example, should different development teams have access to other team's resources? Should some services be allowed to deploy to specific nodes? If a node fails, should a team drop work on features to provision everything together again? If anyone answers "no" to any of the questions, it is a platform concern.

[louiskottmann]

I suspect it's a learning thing.

Which is a shame really because if you want something simple, learning Service, Ingress and Deployment is really not that hard and rewards years of benefits.

Plenty of PaaS who will run your cluster for cheap so you don't have to maintain it yourself, like OVH.

It really is an imaginary issue with terrible solutions.

[mgkimsal]

> they mindlessly decided to use Kubernetes for tasks and purposes that made no sense...

Or... were instructed that they had to use it, regardless of the appropriateness of it, because a company was 'standardizing' all their infrastructure on k8s.

[overfeed]

> it won't include the cruft that we now know was bad cruft.

There's no such thing as "bad cruft" - all cruft is are features you don't use but are (or were) in all likelihood critical to someone else's workflow. Projects transform from minimal and lightning fast, to bloated, one well-reasoned-PR at a time; someone will try to use a popular project and figure "this would be perfect, if only it had feature X or supported scenario Y", multiplied by a few thousand PRs.

[NathanFlurry]

I hope this isn't the case here with Rivet. I genuinely believe that Kubernetes does a good job for what's on the tin (i.e. container orchestration at scale), but there's an evolution that needs to happen.

If you'll entertain my argument for a second:

The job of someone designing systems like this is to decide what are the correct primitives and invest in building a simple + flexible platform around those.

The original cloud primitives were VMs, block devices, LBs, and VPCs.

Kubernetes became popular because it standardized primitives (pods, PVCs, services, RBAC) that containerized applications needed.

Rivet's taking a different approach of investing in different three primitives based on how most organizations deploy their applications today:

- Stateless Functions (a la Fluid Compute)

- Stateful Workers (a la Cloudflare Durable Objects)

- Containers (a la Fly.io)

I fully expect to raise a few hackles claiming these are the "new primitives" for modern applications, but our experience shows it's solving real problems for real applications today.

Edit: Clarified "original cloud primitives"

[motorest]

> Rivet's taking a different approach of investing in different three primitives based on how most organizations deploy their applications today:

I think your take only reflects buzzword-driven development, and makes no sense beyond that point. A "stateless function" is at best a constrained service which supports a single event handler. What does that buy you over Kubernetes plain old vanilla deployments? Nothing.

To make matters worse, it doesn't seem that your concept was thought all the way through. I mean, two of your concepts (stateless functions and stateful workers) have no relationship with containers. Cloudflare has been for years telling everyone who listens that they based their whole operation on tweaking the V8 engine to let multiple tenants run their code in how many V8 isolates they want and need. Why do you think you need containers to run a handler? Why do you think you need a full blown cluster orchestrating containers just to run a function? Does that make sense to you? It sounds like you're desperate to shoehorn the buzzword "Kubernetes" next to "serverless" in a way it serves absolutely no purpose beyond being able to ride a buzzword.

[eddythompson80]

I don't disagree with the overall point you're trying to make. However, I'm very familiar with the type of project that is (seeing as I have implemented a similar one at work 5 years ago) so I can answer some of your questions regarding "How does one arrive at such architecture".

> Why do you think you need containers to run a handler?

You don't, but plenty of people don't care and ask for this shit. This is probably another way of saying "buzzword-driven" as people ask for "buzzwords". I've heard plenty of people say things like

       We're looking for a container native platform
       We're not using containers yet though.
       We were hoping we can start now, and slowly containerize as we go

or

       I want the option to use containers, but there is no business value in containers for me today. So I would rather have my team focus on the code now, and do containers later

These are actual real positions by actual real CTOs commanding millions of dollars in potential contracts if you just say "ummm, sure.. I guess I'll write a Dockerfile template for you??"

> Why do you think you need a full blown cluster orchestrating containers just to run a function?

To scale. You need to solve the multi-machine story. Your system can't be a single node system. So how do you solve that? You either roll up your sleeves and go learn how Kafka or Postgres does it for their clusters or you let Kubernetes most of that hardwork and deploy your "handlers" on it.

> Does that make sense to you?

Well... I don't know. These types of systems (of which I have built 2) are extremely wasteful and bullshit by design. A design that there will never be a shortage of demand for.

It's a really strange pattern too. It has so many gotchas on cost, waste, efficiency, performance, code organization, etc. You always look and whoever built these things either has a very limited system in functionality, or they have slowly reimplemented what a "Dockerfile" is, but "simpler" you know. it's "simple" because they know the ins and outs of it.

[stavros]

> To scale. You need to solve the multi-machine story. Your system can't be a single node system.

Why can't it be? How many customers do you have that you can't deploy a bunch of identical workers over a beefy database?

Companies spend so much time on this premature optimization, that they forget to actually write some features.

[motorest]

> You don't, but plenty of people don't care and ask for this shit. This is probably another way of saying "buzzword-driven" as people ask for "buzzwords".

That's a fundamental problem with the approach OP is trying to sell. It's not solving any problem. It tries to sell a concept that is disconnected from technologies and real-world practices, requires layers of tech that solve no problem nor have any purpose, and doesn't even simplify anything at all.

I recommend OP puts aside 5 minutes to go through Cloudflare's docs on Cloudflare Workers that they released around a decade ago, and get up to speed on what it actually takes to put together stateless functions and durable objects. Dragging Kubernetes to the problem makes absolutely no sense.

[kentonv]

Where did Nathan say he's using Kubernetes? I think I missed something. His comment describes a new alternative to Kubernetes. He's presenting stateless functions and stateful actors as supplementing containers. He knows all about Cloudflare Workers -- Rivet is explicitly marketed as an alternative to it.

It feels like you didn't really read his comment yet are responding with an awful lot of hostility.

[conradev]

I currently need a container if I need to handle literally anything besides HTTP

[motorest]

> I currently need a container if I need to handle literally anything besides HTTP

You don't. A container only handles concerns such as deployment and configuration. Containers don't speak HTTP either: they open ports and route traffic at a OSI layer lower than HTTP's.

[conradev]

Yes! All I was trying to say:

Containers can contain code which open arbitrary ports using the provided kernel interface whereas serverless workers cannot. Workers can only handle HTTP using the provided HTTP interface.

I don’t need a container, sure, I need a system with a network sockets API.

[mdaniel]

FWIW, Lambda takes the opposite of your assertion: there are function entrypoints and the HTTP or gRPC or Stdin is an implementation detail; one can see that in practice via the golang lambda "bootstrap" shim <https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/aws/aws-lambda-go@v1.49.0/lamb...> which is invoked by the Runtime Interface Emulator <https://github.com/aws/aws-lambda-runtime-interface-emulator...>

I don't have the links to Azure's or GCP's function emulation framework, but my recollection is that they behave similarly, for similar reasons

[motorest]

> Workers can only handle HTTP using the provided HTTP interface.

Not true. Cloudflare Workers support Cron triggers and RPC calls in the form of service bindings. Also, Cloudflare Queues support consumer workers.

Claiming "Workers can only handle HTTP" is also meaningless as HTTP is also used to handle events. For example, Cloudflare Queues supports consumers using HTTP short polling.

[lovehashbrowns]

While I think it’s great that kubernetes standardized primitives and I do love that IMO its best “feature” is its declarative nature and how easy it is to figure out what other devs did for an app without digging through documentation. It’s the easiest thing to go through a cluster and “reverse engineer” what’s going on. One of the legacy apps I’m migrating to kubernetes right now has like 20 different deployment scripts that all do different things to get a bunch of drupal multi sites up and running correctly whereas the kubernetes equivalent is a simple deployment helm chart where the most complicated component is the dockerfile. How does Rivet handle this? If I give 100 devs the task of deploying an app there do they get kinda fenced into a style of development that’s then simple to “reverse engineer” by someone familiar with the platform?

[adrianmsmith]

It’s also possible for things to just be too complex.

Just because something’s complex doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be that complex.

[mdaniel]

IMHO, the rest of that sentence is "be too complex for some metric within some audience"

I can assure you that trying to reproduce kubernetes with a shitload of shell scripts, autoscaling groups, cloudwatch metrics, and hopes-and-prayers is too complex for my metric within the audience of people who know Kubernetes

[wongarsu]

Or too generic. A lot of the complexity if from trying to support all use cases. For each new feature there is a clear case of "we have X happy users, and Y people who would start using it if we just added Z". But repeat that often enough and the whole things becomes so complex and abstract that you lose those happy users.

The tools I've most enjoyed (including deployment tools) are those with a clear target group and vision, along with leadership that rejects anything that falls too far outside of it. Yes, it usually doesn't have all the features I want, but it also doesn't have a myriad of features I don't need

[motorest]

> It’s also possible for things to just be too complex.

I don't think so. The original problem that the likes of Kubernetes solves is still the same: setup a heterogeneous cluster of COTS hardware and random cloud VMs to run and automatically manage the deployment of services.

The problem, if there is any, is that some people adopt Kubernetes for something Kubernetes was not designed to do. For example, do you need to deploy and run a service in multiple regions? That's not the problem that Kubernetes solves. Do you want to autoscale your services? Kubernetes might support that, but there are far easier ways to do that.

So people start to complain about Kubernetes because they end up having to use it for simple applications such as running a single service in a single region from a single cloud provider. The problem is not Kubernetes, but the decision to use Kubernetes for an application where running a single app service would do the same job.

[supportengineer]

Because of promo-driven, resume-driven culture, engineers are constantly creating complexity. No one EVER got a promotion for creating LESS.

[colechristensen]

I've also been through the wheel of complexity a few times and I think the problem is different: coming up with the right abstraction is hard and generations of people repeatedly make the same mistakes even though a good abstraction is possible.

Part of it comes from new generations not understanding the old technology well enough.

Part of it comes from the need to remake some of the most base assumptions, but nobody has the guts to redo Posix or change the abstractions available in libc. Everything these days is a layer or three of abstractions on top of unix primitives coming up with their own set of primitives.

[naikrovek]

Just write the stuff you need for the situation you’re in.

This stupid need we have to create general purpose platforms is going to be the end of progress in this industry.

Just write what you need for the situation you’re in. Don’t use kubernetes and helm, use your own small thing that was written specifically to solve the problem you have; not a future problem you might not have, and not someone else’s problem. The problem that you have right now.

It takes much less code than you think it will, and after you’ve done it a few times, all other solutions look like enormous Rube Goldberg machines (because that’s what they are, really).

It is 1/100th of the complexity to just write your own little thing and maintain it than it is to run things in Kubernetes and to maintain that monster.

I’m not talking about writing monoliths again. I’m talking about writing only the tiny little bits of kubernetes that you really need to do what you need done, then deploying to that.

[eddythompson80]

> I’m not talking about writing monoliths again. I’m talking about writing only the tiny little bits of kubernetes that you really need to do what you need done, then deploying to that.

Don't limit yourself like that. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. You will have your monolith in no time

Re-implement the little bits of kubernetes you need here and there. A script here, an env var there, a cron or a daemon to handle tings. You'll have your very own marvelous creation in no time. Which is usually the perfect time to jump to a different company, or replace your 1.5 year old "legacy system". Best thing about it? no one really understands it but you, which is really all that matters.

[naikrovek]

You and I do things differently I guess.

The things like this that I write stay small. It is when others take them over from me that those things immediately bloat and people start extending them with crap they don’t need because they are so used to it that they don’t see it as a problem.

I am allergic to unnecessary complexity and I don’t think anyone else that I have ever worked with is. They seem drawn to it.

[RattlesnakeJake]

See also: JavaScript frameworks

[danudey]

Rivet may be the best of both worlds, because it's not only another complex project built to simplify the complexity of doing complex things, but you also get to have to write all your management in TypeScript.