[hadlock]

The upgrade cycle is a feature, not a bug. If (when) you need to do a big lift and shift, or there's some 0 day CVE, push buttan, get security update. You CAN drift behind but there's a real $$$ cost to that now. Every three months I toss opus at my k8s stack and verify it's compliant with k8s v1.xx.y and then push the upgrade button on my staging cluster, and then a week later I push the upgrade button on my prod cluster. What used to be two days of maintenance every quarter is now more like 2-5 minutes spread across the two upgrades.

I'll admit I'm dreading switching over to the gateway api, but by the time I get forced off ingresses it should be a stable/mature ecosystem. That's still a ways out though.

I don't know anyone still dealing with VMs anymore, except our IT guy who manages a couple of pet servers for random executives from the before times. In the last year k8s has started absorbing executive pet processes and the number of VMs our IT guy manages has dropped by about half.

While I'm here spouting stuff, yeah hiring for k8s is real easy, if our SRE gets hit by a bus, he can be replaced in a week, and we can probably struggle through using opus until that happens. K8s being he lingua franca of git ops IaC makes it real easy for the new guy to parachute in and start working. Every VM thing is going to be totally bespoke and have the personality of the guy who designed it, which is rarely a good thing.

[JohnMakin]

The gateway api people have clearly won and I can’t truly complain because I’m not a maintainer, but I have contributed in the past to a nontrivial part of the tooling built off this ecosystem. The issues with snippets/annotations are a core deficiency with k8s design and eliminating this api creates more problems than it supposedly solves. I have been working on solutions of my own preparing for this inevitability, but it’s rough. ingress annotations like it or not run the modern infra tech stack. if they are persona non grata at any point in the future, a lot of people are going to have a lot of urgent consulting problems in the near to mid distant future.

I to this date have not seen a viable drop in replacement to how I’ve seen big orgs use the ingress controller stack with the gateway api and what i understand currently is ingate is basically DOA.