These kinds of posts always focus on the complexity of running k8s, the large amount of concepts it has, the lack of a need to scale, and that there is a "wide variety of tools" that can replace it, but the advice never seems to become more concrete.
We are running a relatively small system on k8s. The cluster contains just a few nodes, a couple of which are serving web traffic and a variable number of others that are running background workers. The number of background workers is scaled up based on the amount of work to be done, then scaled down once no longer necessary. Some cronjobs trigger every once in a while.
It runs on GKE.
All of this could run on anything that runs containers, and the scaling could probably be replaced by a single beefy server. In fact, we can run all of this on a single developer machine if there is no load.
The following k8s concepts are currently visible to us developers: Pod, Deployment, Job, CronJob, Service, Ingress, ConfigMap, Secret. The hardest one to understand is Ingress, because it is mapped to a GCE load balancer. All the rest is predictable and easy to grasp. I know k8s is a monster to run, but none of us have to deal with that part at all.
Running on GKE gives us the following things, in addition to just running it all, without any effort on our part: centralized logging, centralized monitoring with alerts, rolling deployments with easy rollbacks, automatic VM scaling, automatic VM upgrades.
How would we replace GKE in this equation? what would we have to give up? What new tools and concepts would we need to learn? How much of those would be vendor-specific?
If anyone has a solution that is actually simpler and just as easy to set up, I'm very much interested.
We are running a relatively small system on k8s. The cluster contains just a few nodes, a couple of which are serving web traffic and a variable number of others that are running background workers. The number of background workers is scaled up based on the amount of work to be done, then scaled down once no longer necessary. Some cronjobs trigger every once in a while.
It runs on GKE.
All of this could run on anything that runs containers, and the scaling could probably be replaced by a single beefy server. In fact, we can run all of this on a single developer machine if there is no load.
The following k8s concepts are currently visible to us developers: Pod, Deployment, Job, CronJob, Service, Ingress, ConfigMap, Secret. The hardest one to understand is Ingress, because it is mapped to a GCE load balancer. All the rest is predictable and easy to grasp. I know k8s is a monster to run, but none of us have to deal with that part at all.
Running on GKE gives us the following things, in addition to just running it all, without any effort on our part: centralized logging, centralized monitoring with alerts, rolling deployments with easy rollbacks, automatic VM scaling, automatic VM upgrades.
How would we replace GKE in this equation? what would we have to give up? What new tools and concepts would we need to learn? How much of those would be vendor-specific?
If anyone has a solution that is actually simpler and just as easy to set up, I'm very much interested.