Thread by @QuinnyPig

Okay, here we go.

Kubernetes as a service, or (less charitably) how your SRE / DevOpsy types can cosplay as a cloud provider despite not working for one directly.

https://twitter.com/nickgeracehacks/status/1278533418461126657

I've gotta confess: Kubernetes puzzles me. I gave a talk a few times, "Heresy in the Church of Docker."

I hit on a bunch of problems Docker had. Credit where due, Kubernetes does solve most of them.

The one it doesn't solve to my satisfaction is "why are we doing this?"

It takes work to shove an existing stateful app into stateless containers. It feels like it's one level removed from "image the machines into AMIs and run those in AWS."

It seems to me that k8s solves the problem of "containers are finicky and hard to manage, I'll do it for you."

Oh, but you're going to need a bunch of other things like service meesh and distributed state and a control plane...

One of the sales pitches for Kubernetes is that it lets you build in cloud agnostic ways. People build their applications so that they can run on any cloud provider.

Then they run them on AWS.

(Switch cloud providers to taste; not the fight I'm picking tonight.)

Speaking purely as a cloud economist... Kubernetes sucks, folks.

It looks to the provider like one very weird app. It's hard to allocate costs. It talks to services across AZ boundaries instead of the thing right freaking next to it.

It claims to enable elasticity but most environments uh... do not leverage this capability.

This brings us to managed Kubernetes offerings, because apparently people's desire to cosplay as a cloud provider only goes so far.

GKE, EKS, and AKS each have their own failings, but to me that's stacked atop the original failing that is Kubernetes.

I'll take it a step further. Kubernetes feels like it's aimed at migrating existing workloads, while Serverless feels aimed at future workloads.

Some folks try to split the difference with "run serverless containers" and all hell breaks loose amongst the Twitter Thought Lords.

Meanwhile there's something I'm clearly missing. "So I have this container that has a job in it. I want it to run every twelve hours."

And the entire internet looks at me aghast like I just stood up at Thanksgiving dinner and casually backhanded Grandpa.

"You need a scheduler! And telemetry! And distributed tracing! And Istio or Envoy FIGHT ME HERETIC! And a bunch of other things named after Pokémon!"

I just want to shove everything a cron job needs into a container, and run it every twelve hours.

Look, I get that for certain workloads this solve a whole raft of problems.

Honestly, it feels like it's @gcpcloud reimagining Borg from scratch with the lessons they've learned.

Most companies I see deploying k8s look a lot less like Google, and a lot more like "that's a standard 3-tier webapp."

Honestly, "pay Heroku" is the path of least resistance for a lot of this.

I'm not (quite) bold enough to say that it's all hype, or that it's useless, or a scam.

But I will say that I completely fail to grasp its business value.

What am I missing?

And now I finish ranting and await enlightenment.