Hi, I'm a sysadmin working with traditional VM clusters. In your opinion, what would be the biggest selling point of moving towards containers and later on on K8s? And also, what would be the biggest drawback?
It really all depends on your business and applications you are working on. Now for sysadmins for an example instead of having say some vm with full blown OS like Ubuntu 18.04 and that only does some minimal jobs like cron jobs or parsing data, such things can be converted into a container that are easier to manage than patching, upgrading installing diff tools on Ubuntu + working on an applications that are tied to that VM. So for that alone I think its a good selling point because you are taking away the OS layer and do only what your app should be doing. But then there is something like lambda functions where it gets even better , you run just a code vs a container.
The biggest drawback I think its the stateless applications and databases, such things are OK to have on k8s cluster and even containerize it, however the container and any orchestration infrastructure is not fully there yet and if it is, it can be unstable and not worth it. So if you are looking for a full fledged speeds and latency minimization a VM Cluster or on-prem systems is better because you are minimizing the hops in network..
Another one is the troubleshooting, when shit goes down, and if you are not experienced you could be looking into 10-15 different things what went wrong. On vm cluster you look at only 4-5 things of failures. OS/Storage/Network/Application
Thanks Joe! I was exploring the container/Docker world in the last few weeks, and I'm glad to see that your opinion sort of resonates with the one I was forming.
I'm already looking at specific cases where containers would be more efficient than the usual VM approach, like small python apps and such. But, and that's a big but, the majority of what I have to deal with are database clusters, and the ephemeral nature of containers had me thinking that would be really hard to containerise DB clusters, especially ones with sharding and replicas (take this with a grain of salt because I'm a Docker noob).
Databases in containers is a young fish. Maybe in few years where stability and speed comes up to the par but nothing will beat latency and transactions like a self/cloud hosted server. While I do run some apps and have contsinerized databases like MongoDB etc, been burned few times by simply “don’t touch it” lol.
Yeah if you can offload some of hosts/apps with containers that’s great start.
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Hi, I'm a sysadmin working with traditional VM clusters. In your opinion, what would be the biggest selling point of moving towards containers and later on on K8s? And also, what would be the biggest drawback?
Thanks!
Nicolo,
It really all depends on your business and applications you are working on. Now for sysadmins for an example instead of having say some vm with full blown OS like Ubuntu 18.04 and that only does some minimal jobs like cron jobs or parsing data, such things can be converted into a container that are easier to manage than patching, upgrading installing diff tools on Ubuntu + working on an applications that are tied to that VM. So for that alone I think its a good selling point because you are taking away the OS layer and do only what your app should be doing. But then there is something like lambda functions where it gets even better , you run just a code vs a container.
The biggest drawback I think its the stateless applications and databases, such things are OK to have on k8s cluster and even containerize it, however the container and any orchestration infrastructure is not fully there yet and if it is, it can be unstable and not worth it. So if you are looking for a full fledged speeds and latency minimization a VM Cluster or on-prem systems is better because you are minimizing the hops in network..
Another one is the troubleshooting, when shit goes down, and if you are not experienced you could be looking into 10-15 different things what went wrong. On vm cluster you look at only 4-5 things of failures. OS/Storage/Network/Application
Thanks Joe! I was exploring the container/Docker world in the last few weeks, and I'm glad to see that your opinion sort of resonates with the one I was forming.
I'm already looking at specific cases where containers would be more efficient than the usual VM approach, like small python apps and such. But, and that's a big but, the majority of what I have to deal with are database clusters, and the ephemeral nature of containers had me thinking that would be really hard to containerise DB clusters, especially ones with sharding and replicas (take this with a grain of salt because I'm a Docker noob).
Databases in containers is a young fish. Maybe in few years where stability and speed comes up to the par but nothing will beat latency and transactions like a self/cloud hosted server. While I do run some apps and have contsinerized databases like MongoDB etc, been burned few times by simply “don’t touch it” lol.
Yeah if you can offload some of hosts/apps with containers that’s great start.