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Joe Hobot
Joe Hobot

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Why I fell in love with K8s

This is the first time I am actually using my phone to login and write this post, so please pod with me.

I got to work with Kubernetes just a little bit about 2y ago, mostly was around to see if company I worked for had compatibility utilizing something like containers etc. The more I dived into the more complex it got, however that did not scare me away because after all the complexity is something I actually enjoy, harder challenge = big rewards.

Bit forward, I changed my job and my superior asked me to be on a K8s team. Best thing I could really ever wanted to be in was right there and then.

So why did I fell in love with working on Kubernetes on daily basis? Well for one the community is large and super friendly and helpful, everyone is still in sharing thoughts and solving complexity of it. Another one is the team I work with. All are hands on K8s day in and out, and everyone pitches in brick a day in where we are building yuuugee tower and rewards are amazing.

Example:

CoWorker1 says I’ll try this new thing called Istio, few days later he demo it to our team and other beight minded Devs n Ops. He came up with really nice demo in which he shoed is how one could do a canary deployment yet preserve say 90% of traffic on V1 and 10% of traffic on V2. Sure rolling updated and blue/green deployments are nice but this took it to a whole new level. Soon to be a reality where team of Devs I support will enjoy doing deployments at any point of time and day.

Another one I demoed was bit longer ago called Chaos Monkey which was suggested by my coworker as a pitch, “let’s see how stable our infrastructure is. “ Chaos monkey took out pods and made a Chaos however our infrastructure was stable at the very end.

I worked with many technologies and infrastructure orchestration but Kubernetes is one I can say thus far makes me happy to work on daily basis.

Let me not go into something like Docker Swarm and or Rancher because complexity and pain working with the two is nothing but horrible experience IMO. You either love it or hate it.

If you are working on Kubernetes or something similarly feel free to share your thoughts..

Edit: written on my phone so don't judge on my grammar :). Added few words to make it more hateful towards Rancher loverzz..

Top comments (5)

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tjskrishna profile image
Thejas Krishna • Edited

Companies like Nutanix and Diamanti are offering hardware stack and software stack - with built in Kubernetes cluster management software. All you have to do is plug in the hardware and run the control center and you have a k8s cluster running.

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joehobot profile image
Joe Hobot

I was on Demo with one of them. Impressive. However if you want to self manage it Kubespray is nice too, but hard to setup automation but eventually it works.

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joehobot profile image
Joe Hobot

Agree, the learning part of k8s is up and down.
But with bit of help you eventually get there. Welcome to k8s ;)

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sovereign313 profile image
sovereign313 • Edited

Lol. Complexity of swarm vs K8s? Swarm is 100 times less complex and far easier to setup and use (even at scale) than k8s....

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joehobot profile image
Joe Hobot • Edited

@sovereign313 I should've been more detailed about what I meant by complexity of Docker Swarm and or Rancher.

Here it goes:
Both are ok and easy to setup but me working with it for past few years has been nothing but a trouble. There are open issues and bugs that need immediate attention when it comes to security and or CI/CD pipeline. Also the community it self is much smaller IMO or at least not as active as k8s.. Just checkout k8s slack there is over 48k people on it and some channels with 7k people in it that help you either find something or fix something. Not that I depend on support much, however when you have multi-cluster and thousands of containers Docker Swarm and Rancher for me just don't cut it well. Hope that makes more sense when I mention the complexity of it.

As far as setup K8s can be setup in less than 20 minutes "pre-prod" with almost any provider (except the Baremetal or anything to do with Ansible :) ) ..