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0 pointsekidd2y ago0 comments

I have used a number of orchestrator platforms in production, including AWS ECS (Docker + custom orchestration), EKS (Kubernetes) and Google Cloud's Kubernetes.

I've also used Chef, custom RPM packages and classic Unix startup scripts. And I'm probably forgetting some.

And honestly? Kubernetes can be really great. Especially if you:

- Read enough to understand the split between pods/replication controllers/deployments, which is a bit unusual, and the fact that "services" are basically a name lookup system. This split is weird, but it's not that hard to figure out.

- Pay someone for a quality managed Kubernetes.

- Don't get clever with the networking overlays.

I especially like the way that Kubernetes allows me to deploy almost anything with a short YAML file, and the fact that I never need to worry about individual servers at all.

Now, I wouldn't use Kubernetes if I could get away with a "Heroku like" system. But for anything more complicated than that, Kubernetes can be pretty simple and reliable. Certainly I'd take Kubernetes over a really complex Terraform setup.

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whalesalad2y ago

There is absolutely (still!!!!) room in the market for a PaaS built on top of Kube that is actually good, and is a hybrid of Heroku+Kube. More convention, less all the rope to hang yourself with, while still enabling advanced use cases with full control.

Even docker compose is too annoying for what most people need.

Most of our use cases are so simple. I need a (black box) container that exposes a TCP port. I want N of them. I want them load-balanced with a friendly name. I want them load balanced behind a friendly name with auth in front of it. I want centralized logs, based on these names. I want centralized stats, based on these names (not xyz-pod-232903209284390-dev but xyz aggregated). I want auto deploys based on a github repo. I want my releases tagged with the git short hash.

When someone cracks the nut of heroku+kube they will become the next billionares. This is why I think it is wise to try and enter this space, as Fly is doing.

The new stuff Microsoft has announced (named Radius, not to be confused with RADIUS network auth protocol) is the closes thing to this sort of solution I have been imagining for years: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/the-microsoft-azure-i...

I want N http/tcp/php/python/node/insert-tool-here API or web servers. I want a best-practices RabbitMQ deployment, a best-practices Redis deployment, and a best-practices PostgreSQL deployment. For Redis, I do not care about state, just make it work. For Rabbit, I want 3+ nodes for HA. For PSQL, I do care about state so please use <insert EBS volume here> and do backups.

This is the same shit we have been reinventing for years over and over again and the recipes are all the same now. Radius is the best (at least on paper) attempt at unifying all this stuff.

I've been beating this drum for over 10 years now though, I keep thinking someone will figure it out and no one has. Maybe time to bite the bullet and just do the thing.

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