You Don’t Need Kubernetes

Kubernetes is powerful. You might not need it though. Serverless functions are dope. @devagr is gonna kill me for this one...

Ty for edit Mir!!!

[jocke]

You're wrong, I need kubernetes to successfully manage my blog.

[elmax]

When he says he would have to hire primagen, that isnt a metaphor for infra-engineers. All big companies have to hire primagen eventually, he is the only one who can do it.

[Ca-rpbv]

You are wrong Theo, over-engineering everything is what makes impossible to fire me

[Dan-rxwf]

I need k8s to keep infrastructure complex - JOB SECURITY... you know lol

[EanSchuessler]

Those who ignore Kubernetes are doomed to re-implement it.

[nexxel]

You're wrong Theo. I have 9 users on my app 😱of course I need Kubernetes!!

[BIELSIMON]

This is similar to saying "Why are people using Git? It's too complicated. Dropbox can do the same kind of things."

[joshbedo]

Ive worked at a lot of large companies in NYC and k8 was definitely an improvement from docker images on ECS. I had to setup ECS for the daily beast and it was kind of a nightmare. For anything other than enterprise that stuff is generally overkill. We had to support 120k RPS so thats why we needed to switch from haproxy to nginx, add a redis cache layer, and add ECS with auto scaling groups.

[romanmunar]

Convincing someone more senior than me is the hardest part when moving over to a hosted service/vendor.

[kkoppa]

We moved cloud providers twice and have ~40 microservices! Being on k8s saved our butts for these migrations honestly.

[robertshuxley]

I feel the same way about Redux.
Our company has a very simple UI with simple functionalities and the ones who built our frontend were hardcore Redux purists and all the boilerplate code just slows us down

[JeffryGonzalezHt]

Extremely fair. I find Kubernetes killer feature is managing human complexity - a place I do a lot of work has > 2k developers. A few hundred teams. Enterprisey. Kubernetes is great for them. Much more team autonomy, and almost forces better architecture (less coupling, etc.). Frankly, the unneeded complexity I see most often in those environments is reaching for SPA frameworks (Angular, React, etc.) to build shoddy MVC apps that live in a browser at way too much cost where a Rails or MVC or whatever app would do the same job.
But I really like Kuberentes. I have a cluster in my basement - (and not arguing with your point at all) - but I sometimes feel like the "oh it's too hard!" thing is coming from privileged developers that have never had to deal with infrastructure at all.

[VictorMartinez-zfdt]

At my current job we’ve been serverless from day one. First with amplify and then with sst. It’s reaped massive dividends, and embracing event driven architectures and data modeling up front has made life so much easier from a developer experience.

[tobiasbergkvist]

I'm using microk8s for side projects to keep hosting costs low and not have my side projects interfere despite running on the same server. Also makes it easier to come back to my side projects a year later with everything related to deployment being explicitly defined in yaml files. Requires close to 0 maintenance.

[GuneyCanGokoglu]

I generally agree with the idea of choosing the right tool for the right job, I just wanted to mention there are a lot of managed options for running a k8s cluster like GKE autopilot that can also scales down to 0 which will solve all the issues you raised about k8s.

But yeah, for an app that requires 1-2 services k8s is generally is an overkill.

[nicholaswood]

I think Kubernetes is fine for small/medium size teams as long as you are letting Google or Amazon manage it for you. I have set up K8S clusters from scratch, and I think the real awful, difficult stuff comes from having to deal with the really subtle, difficult problems K8S was designed to manage. You always need to fully understand what you’re getting into either way.

I also yell at everyone who wants to use K8S that they should keep their database as far away from it as possible, because it was specifically designed to service stateless applications— K8S was very specifically not designed for DBM. Manage your database separately no matter how large your org is.

[aprilmintacpineda]

Theo: websockets can't be run on a lambda (goes to suggest pusher and the like)

AWS API Gateway: Am I a joke to you? 🤣🤣

[codecae]

Totally agree that Kubernetes isn't always needed. However, Kubernetes has become more of a means of becoming cloud native, as opposed to just an orchestration/infrastructure solution. The benefits of the cloud native approach are more about protecting your investment in time an effort than tactically responding to cost trade-offs during standard operations and maintenance. The diagrams you've used to promote your position are mainly with consideration to onboarding and creation/maintenance of a solution, but it does not necessarily include the costs you inherit when applying an exit strategy to a vendor-native solution you no longer are able to use to use. As products evolve, which we know they always do, this doesn't always line up with outside influences that can derail a project entirely. If when 'sustaining your business', you need to move from one vendor-oriented product to another (often for reasons out of your control -- pricing, compliance, regulation, sour contract negotiations, etc), the exit strategy itself can case a business to endure EXORBINANT hidden costs that can come out of nowhere; not to mention the unexpected cost of reimplementing interfaces against something else. Kubernetes (no question) has higher operational costs, but like any OpEx challenge, the long term savings in having a vendor-agnostic stack that is not beholden to the whims of a shiny, narrowly scoped vendor-oriented solution has its benefits as well.

[zaktoob]

Like any technology, it really depends on how you choose to implement and maintain it. K8s need not be extremely complicated. It solves a lot of issues very neatly - scalability, redundancy and keeping upgrades rolling in with minimal (potentially even zero) downtime. For a lot of use cases, lambda/serverless is OK, but requires a lot of forward planning if you require state. K8s is not scary!

[PatrikTheDev]

I’m like the absolute opposite of Prime. My whole dev team wanted to self-host everything and run a custom cluster, I vetoed that and we went with Vercel + PlanetScale and a few other managed services (Pusher, EAS, though I try to rely on as little as I can). It was really hard to explain the correlation between infra cost and the cost of developer productivity, now I have a video to send people in these situations. Thanks!