The allure of declarative approaches to complex problem solving has finally been worn down to nothing for me and Kubernetes was the last straw, nearly 10 years ago.
The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else, invariably generates a horror show of extremely verbose boilerplate, duplication, bloat, delays and pain.
If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.
They'll hum along quietly serving many thousands of actual customers and likely cost less to purchase than a single month (or at worst, quarter) of today's cloud-based muggings.
When you pay, you'll pay for bandwidth and that's real value that also happens to make your work environment more efficient.
If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.
You can literally get a Linux box (or two) in the corner and run:
How am I installing a monolith and a database on this Linux box without Kubernetes? Be specific, just show the commands for me to run. Kubernetes that will work for ~anything. HNers spend more tokens complaining about the complexity than it takes to setup.
The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else
Like, brainfuck? Like bash? Like Terraform HCL puppet chef ansible pile-o-scripts? The effort required to output your desired infrastructure's definition as JSON shouldn't really be that gargantuan. You express yourself in anything else but it can't be dumped to JSON?
Yah, also there is a huge difference between a minimal demo and actual, recommended, canonical deployments.
I’ve seen teams waste many months refining k8s deployments only to find that local development isn’t even possible anymore.
This massive investment often happens before any business value has been uncovered.
My assertion, having spent 3 decades building startups, is that these big co infra tools are functionally a psyop to squash potential competitors before they can find PMF.
When you're comparing Kubernetes "recommended, canonical deployments" to "just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner" the latter is obviously going to seem simpler. The point is the k8s analogue of that isn't actually complicated. If you've seen teams waste months making it complicated, that was their choice.
If you’re running things differently and getting tons of value with little investment, kudos! Keep on keeping on!
What I’ve seen is that the vast majority of teams that pick up k8s also drink the micro service kool-aid and build a mountain of bullshit that costs far more than it creates.
The mental gymnastics required to express oneself in yaml, rather than, say, literally anything else, invariably generates a horror show of extremely verbose boilerplate, duplication, bloat, delays and pain.
If you're not Google, please for the love of god, please consider just launching a monolith and database on a Linux box (or two) in the corner and see how beautifully simple life can be.
They'll hum along quietly serving many thousands of actual customers and likely cost less to purchase than a single month (or at worst, quarter) of today's cloud-based muggings.
When you pay, you'll pay for bandwidth and that's real value that also happens to make your work environment more efficient.