← Back to context

Comment by stonemetal12

4 days ago

>I use it because it's the easiest way I've found to get all of these features. Every deployment I've seen that didn't use containers and something like k8s either didn't have a lot of these features, implemented them with a bespoke pile of shell scripts, or a mix of both.

Features aren't pokemon you don't have to catch them all.

Back when stackoverflow was cool and they talked about their infrastructure, they were running the whole site at 5 9s on 10-20 boxes. For a setup like that k8s would have A) required more hardware B) a complete rewrite of their system to k8sify it C) delivered no additional value.

k8s does good things if you have multiple datacenters worth of hardware to manage, for everyone else it adds overhead for features you don't really need.

A) Not much more. The per-node overhead is relatively small and it's not unlikely that they could have made some efficiency gains by having a homogenous cluster that saved them some nodes to offset that.

B) Why on earth would you need to do that? K8s is, at its core, just a thing that runs containers. Take your existing app, stick it in a container and write a little yaml explaining which other containers it connects to. It can do many other things, but just...don't use them?

C) The value is in not having to develop orchestration in house. They already had it so yea, I wouldn't say "throw it out and go to k8s", but if you're starting from scratch and considering between "write and maintain a bunch of bespoke deployment scripts" and "just spin up Talos, write a few yaml files and call it a day" I think the latter is quite compelling.