Comment by mettamage

Comment by mettamage 5 days ago

> you likely do need zero-downtime deployment

I know SaaS businesses that don't as they operate in a single country, within a single timezone and the availability needs to be during business days and business hours.

> easy rollbacks

Yea, I haven't seen exceptions at all on this. So yea.

> server fault tolerance

That really depends. Many B2B or internal apps are fine with a few hours, or even a day, of downtime.

> service isolation

Many companies just have one app and if it's a monolith, then perhaps not.

> Hand-rolling even one of those things

Wow, I see what you're trying to say and I agree. But it really comes across as "if you don't use something like Kubernetes you need to handroll these things yourself." And that's definitely not true. But yea, I don't think that's what you meant to say.

Again, it depends

franga2000 5 days ago

I'm definitely curious about alternatives for getting these features without k8s. Frankly, I don't like it, but 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.

For context, I work in exactly that kind of "everyone in one time zone" situation and none of our customers would be losing thousands by the minute if something went down for a few hours or even a day. But I still like all the benefits of a "modern devops" approach because they don't really cost much at all and it means if I screw something up, I don't have to spend too much time unscrewing it. It took a bit more time to set up compared to a basic debian server, but then again, I was only learning it at the time and I've seen friends spin up fully production-grade Kubernetes clusters in minutes. The compute costs are also negligible in the grand scheme of things.

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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.

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- franga2000 4 days ago
  
  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.
  
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kqr 4 days ago

> I know SaaS businesses that don't as they operate in a single country, within a single timezone and the availability needs to be during business days and business hours.

This is a bad road to go down. Management will understand the implication that it's okay to reduce reliability requirements because "we'll just do the dangerous things on the weekends!"

After some time, developers are scheduled every other weekend and when something breaks during daytime, it's not going to be a smooth process to get it up again, because the process has always been exercised with 48 hours to spare.

Then at some point it's "Can we deploy the new version this weekend?" "No, our $important_customer have their yearly reporting next week, and then we have that important sales demo, so we'll hold off another month on the deployment." You get further and further away from continuous integration.

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