
Why Kubernetes Will Disappear - AndrewBissell
https://medium.com/@davidcarboni/why-kubernetes-will-disappear-10ffcfb39f01
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high_5
IMO the Kubernetes is a "open source bait and switch" business model.

1\. Let the potential customers run it for free 2\. Wait for them to break
their teeth on it. 3\. Offer them GKE. 4\. Profit!!!

To me the whole situation about k8s is that people are running at it like
lemming over the cliff: "Yes, k8s is complex and complicated (even as
SaaS!!!), but it's still great!" As an "operator" this just goes beyond my
comprehension of what good software looks like.

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nouney
GKE is free.

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llampx
GKE is the managed version of Kubernetes that Google Cloud offers. Definitely
not free.

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moondev
Free as in you pay for your worker nodes, but nothing additional for operating
the platform itself. You do lose control over your control plane nodes and
etcd however.

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wodenokoto
Yes, it’s free as long as you pay for it.

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jjeaff
No, there is no extra charge for gke. You pay for the nodes you use and you
pay the same price whether you are using just cloud compute or whether you run
those same cloud compute nodes in a gke.

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tdxcbkifxx
Mhmm, it's free if you pay for the all other stuff.

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nouney
Like everywhere else ...

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Vesuvium
Kubernetes' success is partly due to its novelty, as it happened with Mongo
and Node when they were novelties.

The next-gen cloud systems (storyscript, darklang and so on) are embedding
kubernetes, or the features provided by it, in their platform, so the end
users do need to interact with Kubernetes.

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rtempaccount1
Looks like we're starting to see k8s slide down the slope in the typical "hype
cycle", in the way we've seen Docker do so over the last 12-18 months.

It'll be interesting to see how well it weathers this part of the cycle and
comes out the other side.

For me k8s is useful but overhyped, leading to many companies making use of it
when it really wasn't needed (I've seen k8s cluster deployed for single
applications !?!)

It has a lot of complexity (far more than just Docker/Docker-compose style
stacks) which are only likely to make sense at scale.

The thing that makes me thing k8s will suffer, is that complexity is
increasing not reducing. Things like adding service mesh layer, use of
operators, CRD etc are all additional complication on top of what is a
moderately complex product.

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z9e
Reminds me when Hadoop was going through it's hype cycle and I saw people
installing it for a 10gb data set.

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tonyarkles
But... but... 10GB is REALLY BIG DATA :) You can't open that in Excel!

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solidasparagus
Kubernetes gives you a standard way of describing and running distributed
systems. It makes it easy to share distributed systems with others via a
package manager. It makes it easier for companies to offer tools/services that
simplify the management of distributed systems. It allows you to quickly get
up and running with a complex distributed system (e.g. Kafka, Spark,
Distributed Deep Learning) without relying on a cloud provider service (not
always an advantage, but for some companies being cloud-mobile has substantial
benefits).

That is valuable so I can't see k8s disappearing unless there's a better
distributed OS - I don't see one right now.

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AndrewBissell
The title is maybe a bit clickbaity -- the author does not mean that it will
"disappear" in the literal sense, but rather that in the vast majority of
cases it will become a managed service which end users don't really touch,
much in the same manner as today's data center hardware. All the things you
describe as its advantages could possibly be realized with a simpler interface
provided and managed by a third party.

~~~
solidasparagus
Maybe, but that doesn't make much sense to me. Kubernetes is an OS like Linux.
You work with and think about Linux whether you're running your own hardware
or relying on a cloud service like EC2 or even Lambda. The same will happen to
k8s to the point where you will eventually not have to do any of the
management - but you will still need to understand how the system works, the
primitives it offers and how to use it.

And while k8s is painfully complicated, there were simpler alternatives and
they lost. Maybe that's just a matter of execution or Google hype, but more
likely it's because you need a complicated standard when you want to be able
to describe most distributed systems.

~~~
AndrewBissell
I definitely see your side of the argument and I am sympathetic to the idea
that (most of) the complexity of Kubernetes is inherent to the problem domain.
That said, lots of devs do get by with knowledge of only the barest essentials
of Linux.

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bg24
From my personal experience of working on it, it is becoming simpler every
month. So from a infrastructure standpoint, it is going to be much simpler
than vSphere or Openstack. This is a no-brainer.

Now, do everyone need to run their applications on Kubernetes? Say, I invested
millions $$ into Kubernetes, but the very business applications that my team
built were proven to be not worthy. Then I see competition happily using same
old VM, lambda, api gateways, but much improved operations (logging, ML,
automation). I think what is going to decide the widespread success will be
the adoption of applications that run on Kubernetes. It will be 3-5 years
until we know. Right now it is a honeymoon phase and let us enjoy and ride the
wave.

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dimitar
A company I know writes software for small banks and telcos (which means no
cloud) and has decided to switch to a Microservices architecture and all
deployment concerns of clients were waved away with "Kubernetes takes care of
it". Now the poor IT teams will have to learn K8s really quickly, and my guess
is that they will fall back to Docker on VMs with compose as it simpler -
Kubernetes is much more complicated to deploy than the 20 containers that the
clients actually care about. But the IT teams of these clients they are not
going to be happy over the whole ordeal.

When stories like this seems to me like a huge indication that K8s is at the
top of the hype cycle. It only is suitable for maybe 5% of on-premise IT
organizations, and the cloud is not for everyone (fortunately and
unfortunately).

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alexandercrohde
As a DevOps engineer really trying to decide if learning kubernetes in a
necessary investment I'm interested.

I think containerization is here to stay for sure. It just seems kubernetes
offers a ton of complexity and commands that may be hard to debug to do things
that I wish could be solved with an easier abstraction (maybe just AWS
autoscaling groups?)

The key quote for me is this, (but I'm interested in opinions of others):

 _In the end, precisely because it’s generic and because running a deployment
platform is an undifferentiated hard problem, it can and will be commoditised.
Fargate and Cloud Run (Knative) are already barrelling down this road._

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jjeaff
To me, kubernetes is basically containerization for infrastructure. So it
makes sense that if containers are here to stay it is here to stay (or at
least something like it).

Sure you can use AWS autoscaling, but that will only work on AWS.

I can tear down my kubernetes cluster on gke and without too much trouble,
launch the whole thing on someone else's hosted kubernetes or run my own on
bare metal.

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segmondy
Saying that k8s is complicated is like saying your OS is complicated and will
disappear. It's ridiculous.

Kubernetes is a network OS for scale. It's far easier to run an application on
a cluster of hundreds to thousands of computers using kubernetes as the
orchestrator than to use something home grown.

If you don't have a scaling/cluster problem, then k8s is not for you. If you
on the other hand have application spanning a hundred computers, it's probably
worth it for you.

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nickthemagicman
What's the deal.with Docker swarm? It's MADE by Docker and seems like it could
handle a bunch of biz use cases?

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giobox
There’s always been two major threads to container software offerings - the
container tech itself and container orchestration tools like
Swarm/kubernetes/rancher etc.

Docker have had great success with the former but have never really delivered
an industry leading product in the later. Swarm has had a number of drawbacks
over the years vs some competitor offerings.

