Ably blog claims company doesn't need Kubernetes to scale, surge in traffic takes down entire website
- Reference: 1626950708
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/22/ably_doesnt_need_kubernetes/
- Source link:
Maik Zumstrull is writer of code at Ably, a company which runs pub/sub (publish and subscribe) messaging services. He [1]wrote a post titled "No, we don't use Kubernetes" stating that the Google-invented container orchestration software is "very much at the peak of its hype cycle."
However, he added that for what Ably does – "run a large scale production infrastructure that powers our customers' real-time messaging applications around the world" – using Kubernetes would not help. His post appears to have been prompted by the fact that some customers and potential new recruits see this non-adoption as a problem. "We have even had interesting candidates walk away from job offers citing the fact that we don't use Kubernetes as the reason," Zumstrull said.
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Ably seems on the face of it to be a good candidate for Kubernetes. "Our entire production environment exists on AWS," said Zumstrull, with virtual machines running Docker and software deployed in containers.
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He claimed that the features of Kubernetes were not required. Each VM instance is deployed to run a certain set of containers, which does not change for the life of the instance. Each set of containers maps to an AWS Auto Scaling group. There are "lightweight monitoring services" on each instance that monitor container health, respawn one that dies, and terminate the instance if a container goes out of date. "Because one autoscaling group equals one production service, we can use the normal AWS method of pointing one NLB [Network Load Balancer] at one autoscaling group as the target group, with no additional abstraction layer required," he said.
The company has investigated Kubernetes and reckons it "would need at least ten clusters (one for each of ten regions)." Zumstrull said: "We would be doing mostly the same things, but in a more complicated way." What about the benefits of Kubernetes, though, such as multi-cloud portability? Zumstrull is a multi-cloud sceptic. "The differences between the major cloud providers do matter, and Kubernetes does not succeed at abstracting them away," he said.
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Kubernetes would add cost, he argued, thanks to its complexity and the number of services that have to be configured on top of the platform.
[6]Good guy Russia gives enterprises, cloud platforms a free brute-force security test using Kubernetes clusters
[7]Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report
[8]Enterprise databases deployed in Kubernetes? Proceed with caution, warns seasoned analyst
[9]Siloscape malware targets Windows containers, breaks through to the underlying Kubernetes cluster
It seems that Zumstrull's post struck a nerve. Thanks to a discussion on Hacker News, the website was overwhelmed with traffic, causing Ably co-founder and CTO Paddy Byers to [10]comment : "Ably CTO here. Well that went well..." Byers noted that although the website fell over (it was not just the blog), "the realtime service and website are different things. The blog post is talking about the service, which has been continuously available."
As for the content of the post, opinions vary. "Perhaps my team runs a simpler cluster, but we have been running a Kubernetes cluster for 2+ years as a team of 2 and it has been nothing less than worth it," [11]said one comment; while another [12]remarked that "my experiences with k8s have led me to never propose k8s in a new project. The k8s instances I have seen were bureaucratic and technical nightmares of unnecessary complexity. It doesn't provide a common ground for deployments because everyone will use and configure it differently."
The most telling comments, perhaps, were those about the benefits of standardisation and community. "Now live with your bad/good design patterns on your own for the life cycle of your product or service, you get none of the shared knowledge and advancement through the k8s community or platform," [13]said a Hacker News reader.
Even if Kubernetes is not the best solution now, if adoption and development continues at its present rate, it just might be in future.®
Get our [14]Tech Resources
[1] https://ably.com/blog/no-we-dont-use-kubernetes
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YPmWITfvTNBca26XuT5tTAAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YPmWITfvTNBca26XuT5tTAAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YPmWITfvTNBca26XuT5tTAAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YPmWITfvTNBca26XuT5tTAAAANI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/01/kubernetes_russia_warning/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/29/kubernetes_spend_report/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/24/postgres_kubernetes_danger/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/08/siloscape_malware_windows_containers/
[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27895424
[11] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27894028
[12] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27896337
[13] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27899092
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"... standardisation processes over the years shows it can just produce the least worse one that works."
I couldn't agree more. Standards are good to a point. Unfortunately it's like voting for lizards; one has to vote for ones own lizard just so the other guy's lizard does not get elected; to paraphrase Douglas Adams. Plus people use standards as a shield for doing really, really, dumb things.
A case in point; the height above the floor of the average display screen in a video conferencing system is defined by a specification. The problem is, it's way too close to the floor. This leads to the display being blocked by most of the participants sitting around a table. When I pointed this out to the IT folks installing my companies systems they pointed to the specification, installed so that no one could really see the screen without playing "gopher" and started walking away. The result: No one uses the expensive video system.
I asked one of the IT guys that if the specification had said to mount the screen on the ceiling, would they have done that? My boss, who was in the room at the time face palmed, because I was right and he knew I was about to add another notch to my "Idiot IT lizard" belt. As you might expect, the IT guy froze, got mad, red in the face, and walked out, he wasn't able to give the correct response, which would have been "no" since he was specification locked.
If a solution doesn't make sense for an organization, it doesn't make sense for THAT organization, and that's ALL it means.
silver bullets
word. And the idea that even if k8s is not a good fit now you should use it anyway incase it is in the future is pretty crazy. There exists a small possibility k8s is never the right solution for a coffee machine.
I am highly sceptical of anyone who thinks _any_ software is a silver bullet.
" A good look at standardisation processes over the years shows it can just produce the least worse one that works.
Hello, WiFi Alliance, are you listening?
Who says What
One guy says "yes, we use this", then another guy says "no, we don't use this"?
Either way, I wouldn't trust these people to pour piss out of a boot, even if the directions to do so we're printed on the bottom of said "boot".
"Now live with your bad/good design patterns on your own for the life cycle of your product or service, you get none of the shared knowledge and advancement through the k8s community or platform,"
This is an interesting argument, but it does suppose that the 'community' always comes up with the best solution to a given problem. A good look at standardisation processes over the years shows it can just produce the least worse one that works.
How do you avoid the echo chamber effect? People doing things because others did them before, then that becoming the 'way'? (You see this a lot with thinks like Stack Overflow... there's many cut and pasted examples of things where a few vestigial config options, or code lines have crept in as the cut and paste cycle continues, or all the websites that happily tell you the rules to drastically reduce the brute force attack space on their passwords.
Personally, I always find the companies that do things differently to be a bit more interesting. So long as you can give well thought out reasons, it often shows you've considered the problem deeper than just getting the off the shelf solution. Sometimes that can allow you to provide the differentiation between your competitors.
Mind you, get it wrong, and you'll just be re-inventing the wheel a lot. :D