
Finding the Right PaaS for Kubernetes - oap_bram
https://bram.dingelstad.xyz/blog/finding-the-right-paas-for-k8s/
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oap_bram
Hey guys, author here. I'm starting a weekly blog where I try to recap I thing
I did that week. I'm not sure if it's super interesting, but I have a fun time
writing these articles. Let me know what y'all think!

Thanks for reading!

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harrisonjackson
Even if no one else reads them it'll be a great resource for you later on!

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Jgrubb
> Making these bash scripts is fun and having your own deploy stack is neat,
> but having a standard and not having to worry about the tools that you’re
> using is a luxury I wanted to have for Quest Vault.

I'll admit that I don't know a lot about Kubernetes but I'm pretty sure it is
the opposite of a tool that you don't have to worry about. On the contrary I'm
pretty sure it's designed for situations where worrying about your
infrastructure is part of your core business.

For a couple of "normal" websites you'll be burning a lot of hours on
something you already have working with a couple of bash scripts.

~~~
outworlder
> For a couple of "normal" website

Define 'normal' websites.

If can use static websites, or something like Heroku, then do so. K8s is
basically irrelevant for this case. If you need to use VMs or containers,
that's where the fun begins.

It is very tempting to just cobble together some bash scripts to install
Apache, Nginx or the like, and _try_ to forget about it. You mostly will,
until you get pages. Maybe is some logs that are getting out of hand, maybe a
process died and you forgot to add an auto-restart. Maybe your app got
featured on hacker news... did you remember to create an auto-scaling group
(or similar)? No? Now you'll be scrambling to clone your VMs. Do you have
HTTPS (pretty much a requirement these days)? How are you rotating your certs?
What happens when one of the machines go down? How do you even find which
services are up? Now you have to configure a health check. I could keep going,
but you get the picture.

For each and every one of these situations, K8s has an answer. Many of them
are out of the box and for free. All you need to do is to provide a couple of
YAMLs describing what you need. It will take care of the rest. You can deploy
complex applications this way, in a standardized fashion. Yes, k8s looks
complex, but it is trying to tackle a hard problem.

Basically, ask yourself this: would I benefit if I ran this thing on
containers? Do I ever envision myself running this on more than one machine?
If so, you would probably benefit from some container orchestration, of which
K8s is the prime example.

I would advise against trying to install K8s by yourself, that can be a rabbit
hole. Either use a cloud provider, use something like Kubeadmin or, if you are
playing with one single machine, Ubuntu's micro k8s.

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jeremyjh
OP is running a wordpress site. k8s with _any_ wrapper adds a ton of
accidental complexity for some very, very meager savings in this context.

Its great people like to play with trendy toys and write articles about them
to drive traffic to their business. But this is really bad advice if you take
it at face value.

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oap_bram
True! Although we are planning to run a big part of our infrastructure on k8s
as well. This includes microservices for getting map information for our
games, and automated game generation. For now it was just the Wordpress.

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freedomben
A lot of people are surprised that K8s isn't a PaaS. Kelsey Hightower himself
said however, K8s is a platform for platforms, not the end game itself[1].

[1]
[https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/93525292372179353...](https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/935252923721793536)

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teepo
I wonder why/if you looked into OKD?

[https://www.okd.io/](https://www.okd.io/)

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oap_bram
Yes! I didn't get around to installing it. This is mostly because of the
documentation, media and videos being relatively intimidating and looking like
a bigger undertaking then I would need for my use case.

RedHat is very eager for you to use their software, which is cool, but they
also seem to focus on really big enterprise with training videos and courses.
I was looking more for a project that just has some markdown documents with an
example I can run within a few minutes.

Did you use OKD? And what is your experience, I'm curious to hear from another
developer what it's like! I could try it again later, because it sure looked
exciting!

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rtempaccount1
I'd agree with your assessment that RH are more about the enterprise installs.

Whilst the 4.X series of Openshift has been out as a commercial product since
mid last year, there's still (AFAIK) no release version of the open source
version of okd.

The Openshift 3.X version is now horribly outdated (based on Kubernetes 1.11),
so there's no good non-commercial version that I can see...

