I have a partially renovated little village house with a small backyard and shed about 19km from Fugueira da Foz Portugal I will sell you for the €24k I have stuck in it. The interior needs doing but the roof is new… near Montemor-o-velho…
The tax is 40€ (forty euros) a year. South facing king roof slope ideal for panels and south facing varanda over the backyard.
I don’t think so.
I run 2 dedicated-cpu cloud instances that will thrash any load you throw at it high availability, and I can spin up an entire 3-node production cluster in a few minutes with good old Ansible and some cloud provider module.
Kibernetes brings me overhead and wastes system resources.
I already have infrastructure as code.
Why would I want to containerize systems I already have YAML to describe?
People forget they real hardware has to run this stuff, and layers os schedulers are not helpful.
Look at the disaster of fibers threads and processes already!
“So you want to run a bunch of stuff on one computer, why?”
In a quest to get closer to the metal, Kubernetes keeps you far away, which is the opposite of what any production service should want.
What is the purpose of adding layers when uni-kernels and eco-kernels give you better isolation and better performance?
Your cloud provider already runs your virtual machines OS on a hardware hypervisor. Then running Kubernetes on top of the OS and then a zillion containers on it is a recipe for poor performance.
What is the logic here that I am clearly missing?
Cloud providers native Kubernetes stacks don’t improve performance or pricing, compared to their cloud compute instances virtual machines and a dedicated virtual machine per would-be-container that thankfully doesn’t need to now share processing resources with others.
What gives? Why on earth would anyone run production processes in Kubernetes?
Merely making scriptable infrastructure doesn’t require kubernetes or containers… Ansible or it’s ilk will do just fine.
Deploy cloud instances like you currently deploy containers.
Save money, get better performance, have real networking.
*i have used kubernetes and understand how to use it as intended. I feel like I am missing the motivation for it’s current widespread usage in web apps
The advantage of K8s isn't really in the virtualization technique used, but in the orchestration it can be made to perform for you. You can for sure configure K8s to use a host per container, if this is what you want.
Example of thing that is pretty straightforward in K8s and much less straightforward outside of it.
1. For compliance reasons, you need to make sure that your underlying OS is patched with security updates.
2. This means you need to reboot the OS every X time.
3. You want to do this without downtime.
4. You have a replicated architecture, so you know you have at least two copies of each service you run (and each can handle the required traffic).
In K8s, this operation can be as simple as:
1. Mark your old nodes as unschedulable.
2. Drain your old nodes (which will grab new nodes from your cloud provider, installing the updated machine image).
3. Delete your old nodes.
The exact steps will differ based on your use case, but that's basically it.
Steps you didn't need to think about here:
1. If I'm about to take a node down, do I have enough redundancy to handle its loss? K8s understands the health of your software, and you have a policy configured so it understands if taking down a container will cause an outage (and avoid this). Note: third party tech will be naturally compatible - if you use Elastic's cloud-on-k8s operator to run ES, it'll appropriately migrate from host to host too, without downtime. Likewise, the same script will run on AWS, Azure, GCP.
2. How fast can I run this? If building this logic yourself, you'll probably run the upgrade one node at a time so as to not have to think about the different services you run. But if it takes 15 minutes to run a full upgrade, you can now only upgrade 100 hosts each day. K8s will run whatever it can, as soon as it can without you having to think about it.
3. What happens if concurrent operations need to be run (e.g. scale-up, scale-down)? With K8s, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
4. Does this need to be monitored? This is a fairly standard K8s workflow, with most components identical to standard scale-up/scale-down operations. Most components will be exercised all the time.
Generally I've been impressed by how straightforward it's been to remove the edge cases, to make complex tech fit well with other complex tech.
A while back we upgraded between two CentOS versions. In such a case it's recommended to reinstall the OS - there's not a clear upgrade path. In K8s, this would have been the same set of steps as the above. In many orgs, this would be a far more manual process.
It deduplicates the kernel memory and system image base disk.
The minimum virtual machine size for a Windows server that is at all useful for anything is 4 GB of memory. Okay, okay, so you can technically boot it up on 2 GB and some roles will work fine, this will last only until some dingbat remotes to it with RDP with a 4K monitor and it starts swapping to disk.
Even if you use Server Core and block port 3389, it still needs a ton of memory just to start.
Running in a container it uses a few hundred megabytes.
Similarly, the minimum system disk size you can get away with is 32 GB if it is a discardable / ephemeral instance. You need 64 GB minimum if you ever intend to run Windows Update on it.
With containers, the unique parts of the image might be just a few hundred megabytes, even for complex apps.
My experience is with Windows, but from what I hear Linux VMs vs Linux containers have vaguely similar ratios.
So with containers, a single host can run dozens of applications, all sharing the same base disk, and all sharing the same OS kernel. The savings can be staggering.
At $dayjob, the admins are very much stuck in the dedicated VMs for every role mentality, and they're burning through enormous piles of taxpayer money to run them at literally 0.1% load.
Having said that, Kubernetes has its own problems. As you said, layering it on top of cloud VMs is a bit silly, and can easily result in the container running in a nested hypervisor at molasses speeds. Similarly, every single typical process changes dramatically: Deployment, updates, monitoring, auditing, etc...
Combine the above with the incompatible underlying cloud layer and things get really messy really quickly.
In my experience 90% of the world just isn't ready for the learning curve. Windows as an operating system isn't ready, certainly. Microsoft Azure isn't really ready either. Their AKS managed offering is still undergoing massive churn and seems to have more preview features than stable features. Even in the Linux world I hear more horror stories than success stories. It seems that everyone who says they love Kubernetes is using it on like... one machine. Come back and tell me how you feel after troubleshooting a failed upgrade on a cluster managing $100M of finance transactions.
What I would like to see is "native Kubernetes clouds" where the hosts are bare metal and there is no impedance mismatch between K8s and the cloud provider APIs because K8s is the API. Instead of the Azure portal or the AWS console you literally log into a Kubernetes console.
IMHO that would allow a true commoditisation of the public cloud and start to erode the near-duopoly of AWS and Azure.
I think exokernels and isokernels solve many of these issues where containers are currently used, check the Ocaml community for examples.
They run on hardware.
Ultimately, there needs to be a singular scheduling system running on hardware and a singular HAL-like driver layer, and exo or iso kernels deliver just that, vs lxe containers provided by os services.
The entire second amendment here:
“ A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Notice the first phrase.
Absolutely nothing here says “every Joe wacko can have military grade arms in case they want to overthrow the government “
Tell me it’s originalism to interpret the words above in any way other than what it reads as: a description of state militias.
… based on a proposed bill that never became law.
The Supreme Court based their judgement on the Obama era Clean Power Act which never became law.
That’s how out-of-their-way to cause trouble this court went.
This Supreme Court is going out of its way to be destructive and cause harm.
1) be careful! The magnetic coating will flake off and you will lose the data.
Research a bit: this is a solved problem. There are chemical treatments to render the oxide coating more flexible for an attempt at reading it.
2) is there a way to avoid forcing physical contact with rubber capstans as you attempt to pass it over a magnetic play head?
Is there an alternative magnetic sensing technology you can use to extract the data vs a proximity based typical tape playback head?
I think it’s rather that, in a bicameral parliamentary representative democracy one knows that one is ultimately partially responsible for those in office, and one cannot just shrug and blame higher ups.
from my personal experience people in the east (and perhaps south) usually look at their rep dem system much more cynically than people in the west (and north). and this attitude is very much reinforced by american patriotism freedom and democracy myth-making. i find its achievements absolutely amazing. how indigenous people and those that not that long ago were subdued into slavery can now be patriotic to the same flag that brought them so much misery is baffling to me
Well, if you are ultimately responsible for your own government and it’s mess, you realize that it’s a losing proposition to simply be cynical about your government.
Maybe it’s time to fix your government instead of acting disengaged and cynical?
In other news: people in corrupt places have low faith in their systems.
America certainly has its problems and corruption, but if you look at what are considered the least corrupt nations on earth, say Finland, you find higher trust in society and government etc.
So I’ll contend that trauma traumatizes people, aka you are stating a tautology
Also, your observations about “east” fail to account for places like Japan, South Korea, and in terms of trust, I think you find high trust in places like Singapore, but only from a certain set of empowered locals, ditto Dubai…
But your intended generalism is perhaps Eastern Europe?
I think it’s rather a concern that too much bending over backwards to please Xi will jeopardize their customers trust.
There is a concerted effort now afoot both in the EU and the USA to bring certain tech fabrication processes to domestic shores for various reasons.
The race to the bottom of costing in pursuit of profit margins brought other issues to the forefront and once the market probed the lower end of costing possibilities consumers noticed things like scissors that bend when cutting paper, and there’s been a large backlash, arguably one of the principle fuels feeding the fires of this fake so-called-populism.
Im not so sure about China being the economic future of the world these days, despite decades hearing this and despite actual economic sizes and pollution footprints, as I’m not sure China and the US or EU markets can decouple effectively so easily. It’s a bit of a double edged sword for all concerned
> Im not so sure about China being the economic future of the world these days, despite decades hearing this and despite actual economic sizes and pollution footprints, as I’m not sure China and the US or EU markets can decouple effectively so easily. It’s a bit of a double edged sword for all concerned
The US/EU for a long time acted like "change through trade" (or in German, "Wandel durch Handel") would be a realistic prospect for dealing with both China and Russia. Obviously that failed, with Russia invading Ukraine and China following the 1933-45 footsteps with the Uyghurs. The behavior of both Russia and China has become so explicitly bad that even the hope for profits cannot make politicians look away longer.
The problem is: China has amassed enormous amounts of money, and they are using that money in a way similar to the Marshall Fund of the past-1945 era to build out immense support and a destination market for their goods in Africa and Asia. For better or worse, China will become a dominant player in geopolitics.
Regardless of how much money they throw around, the list of China’s friends in Asia is much shorter than the list of countries that would literally rather burn to the ground than bend the knee to a Chinese emperor again, and I think that’s a big problem for their aspirations of being a major player in geopolitics.
The tax is 40€ (forty euros) a year. South facing king roof slope ideal for panels and south facing varanda over the backyard.