
Show HN: Magic Sandbox – learn Kubernetes on real infrastructure - mstipetic
https://magicsandbox.com
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StavrosK
I found Kubernetes to be easier to learn than the docs would suggest, and I
wrote up a short article as a high-level overview. I hope it helps someone,
and that it saves you a lot of time:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/kubernetes-101/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/kubernetes-101/)

You may want to spend two minutes reading this before going into the post's
website, as an overview.

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tootie
This is a really cool platform, but it kinda exposes the extremely high
barrier of entry to getting running with k8s. It's a very powerful and useful
platform, but it doesn't seem to strike the right balance with it's
abstractions to actually make intuitive sense to developers.

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djsumdog
This is the problem I have with almost all container orchestration systems
(DC/OS, K8s, etc.) None of them can go from 1 node running all your apps to
100, in an easy straight forward manner. I wrote about this not too long ago:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-
wit...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-docker-
and-container-orchestration-systems/#zero-to-a-hundred)

I've also worked at both Kubernetes shops and DCOS/marathon shops and I
honestly don't understand why people are choosing K8s. I'm sure a lot of it is
the marketing and the power of Google behind it, but our DC/OS cluster had
hundreds of nodes and could scale applications really well. Plus I found the
marathon json files way less confusing. (Plus if you really want, you can use
k8s to schedule containers on DC/OS, alongside marathon).

That being said, that DCOS platform team was 11 people and they had tons of
custom scripts, wiki pages, labels and specific networking ingress/egress
points that all worked together. (You could even use a label to specify if you
wanted to run containers on the local VMWare cluster or in AWS; with nodes
that auto-scaled out into AWS in high load).

I've met people at smaller startups who've gone the Nomad route instead, which
seems a lot more sane in many ways, but still requires pretty careful planning
and setup for large deploys.

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asdkhadsj
So I'm heading a shop with some serious legacy deployment woes. I've got plans
for everything but scaling. Now, we're likely to hire out Ops eventually, but
for now I'd like to learn devops _(backend eng currently)_ and cut my teeth by
getting the ball rolling on a slightly more robust setup.

With that said, what do you recommend? We're a small shop, and our auto
scaling needs a very very minimal. We're non-public facing, so our user base
is pretty predictable. Yet, I'd like to migrate us to a more modern and mature
system. Naturally I was looking towards K8s because of the overwhelming
support I see for K8s on HN/etc, but your comment makes me question that.

Honestly, it's the vast options that really screw with my head. There are just
so many tools. And where they lack is not immediately evident from the
outside. It's difficult to pick a direction. At the moment I'm reviewing
Nomad, as it sounds interesting to work with our existing by-hand
infrastructure.

~~~
brightball
What you are going through is why “Just use Heroku” is still great advice from
wise people.

There are so many options out there that until you actually hit the point
where Heroku is too expensive or no longer makes sense...Heroku is your best
option (if AWS is an option).

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
Don't forget Dokku -
[https://github.com/dokku/dokku](https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

Dokku is _extremely_ flexible Heroku alternative, and a good introduction to
dev-ops. You can start-out treating it like a "dumb" Heroku host, but install
plugins and customise to your heart's content. You can easily migrate from
apps/buildpacks to Dockerfile's one app at a time etc.

Whilst it's great for getting your apps up and running, and learning basic
dev-ops at your own pace. It's not really designed for scale/reliability. So
if your small business/app/service starts to take off, you'll quite likely
need to migrate to K8s, Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS, if not for scale, for
redundancy/reliability.

~~~
StavrosK
I rented a 10 EUR VPS from Hetzner and put Dokku on it. It currently runs ~10
side-projects and I couldn't be happier.

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mstipetic
Hey guys, we're really trying to keep up, but we've gone to 300+ servers in a
few minutes. I'm happy to answer any questions here you may have

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earth2mars
what does that mean? are you going to support more servers or you can't
provide more servers?! Thank you for this. looks interesting. would love to
get hands-on but it says "We are booting up your cluster!"

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mstipetic
Hey we hit our hard limit of 500 servers, I'm trying to shut down old ones,
really sorry about that, but traffic is just crazy

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nmg
Sounds like the good kind of problem! Let me chime in and say thank you for
implementing and sharing this.

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mstipetic
Thank you very much! Rationally I know this is a good thing, but doesn't feel
that way right now

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mwj
How is this different to www.katacoda.com?

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vishnu_ks
I would also like to know. I initially thought it was katacode.

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mstipetic
we really love katacoda! we're a bit more oriented on trying to visually
explain what's happening (not there yet) and we're trying to give you a very
high level of interactivity

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Arubis
Super interested to see how this works once the hug has subsided. This is
potentially fortuitous timing; my employer wants me to cover most of this
material by end of quarter.

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mstipetic
Thanks a lot, really didn't expect this kind of traffic. If you ever want to
get in touch you can reach me at mislav@<website-domain> or through our slack
that's on our landing page and inside console

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tjungblut
Will it be possible to contribute lessons to your platform? I find conferences
a terrible place to share knowledge on K8s, this makes it a lot easier and
hands-on.

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mstipetic
Yes! I'm working on an editor right now, feel free to contact me at mislav at
magicsandbox dot com if you're interested

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Operyl
Super cool! Is only 1 level available right now?

EDIT: Further, the front page marketing and actual app don't line up 1:1 very
well when it comes to listing lessons.

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mstipetic
Yeah, sorry, we're still building it up, we didn't plan for this big of a
reception, just wanted to test if there's any interest out there

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dfcowell
Good problem to have. :)

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alpb
What do the Facebook Google Microsoft logos at the bottom of this page mean?
Are these companies Magic Sandbox customers?

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theyoungwolf
Is this for someone who has no experience with any of this or is there prior
knowledge required?

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mstipetic
Hey, we currently host only an intro course but we're building out advanced
courses now. So no kubernetes prior knowledge is necessary, but we assume
you're a developer with some experience

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Drdrdrq
> 1 year early bird access

> Get 1 year unlimited access to MSB Premium including all lessons and weekly
> releases.

> This is a non-recurring, one time payment.

You probably need to fix this, or at least clarify? Is it a yearly sum or one-
time payment?

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mstipetic
Hm, we're doing a presale with unlimited access for 1 year in one payment

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Drdrdrq
That sounds good, but I would suggest clarifying this. Good luck btw!

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Rafuino
Can't find it on your site... where are you spinning up all these servers for
the sandbox? GCP? Azure? AWS? Somewhere else?

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mstipetic
Digital Ocean currently. Just running minikube and kubectl proxy for the feed

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lgregg
This is awesome, I been looking for something like this.

