DigitalOcean Introduces Kubernetes Product

[jorams]

This is a great development, but I'll have to wait and see how reliable it actually is. I've had a few droplets running with them over the years, and that has been rock solid (years of uptime on one droplet, no problems whatsoever), but we recently started using Spaces for a commercial product and it has been a catastrophe. There are connectivity issues leaving the service mostly unavailable on a regular basis, and the status updates about it aren't particularly timely.

While trying to migrate away to GCS, synchronizing data (using gsutil) has proven practically impossible. The API is incredibly slow to list objects and occassionally responds with nonsensical errors.

(Every once in a while a random "403 None" appears, causing gsutil to abort. We could probably work around that by modifying gsutil to treat 403 as retry-able, but since overall performance is so awful and we can regenerate most data, we decided to give up.)

[newsat13]

Yeah, DO Spaces is all around awful. Deleting is extremely slow as well. We had to write special code because DO cannot delete 1000 objects at a time (takes like 2 minutes for the api call to succeed, if it succeeds at all). To the extent that we had to just resort to delete entire buckets. The UI also keep crashing when there are many objects :(

[leesalminen]

I use rclone as a wrapper for gsutil. Works much better. It’s rsync for the cloud.

[aldanor]

Ditto, droplets are great and stable (and, somewhat surprisingly, CPU-optimized ones seems to perform better on average than the equivalent from AWS). I've tried to make it work with Spaces for the last 6 months (NYC3), but it's just a disaster, I could barely sync the data back to AWS S3 last week (you have to do it from a droplet in the same region, otherwise your chances are close to 0%). Downloading/uploading large objects is perfectly fine, but something's inherently broken at the metadata layer, so listing objects is either ridiculously slow or you get timeouts and weird errors like 'limit rate exceeded'.

TL;DR: droplets are good; avoid Spaces like the plague.

[flossball]

Pricing is key.

Right now I spin up GCE based clusters as the head and version migration is free and I only pay for 2 non-preemptible adequate nodes. The rest scale and preempt somewhat cheaply as needed.

[eddiezane]

Eddie from DigitalOcean here.

You'll only need to pay for your worker nodes and we'll handle upgrades for you.

[manishsharan]

Could you please share the details of your setup ? I am not familiar with Google Cloud but being able to scale up cheaply with pre-emptible instances sounds great.

[summarity]

Super nice. Been running k8s on DO using Rancher, but a native solution will be really awesome.

I'd like to see it as tightly integrated into e.g. GitLab like GKE is.

[eganist]

For the curious: k8s is a specific kind of contraction -- a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym. Other examples include i18n = internationalization.

[thepumpkin1979]

Rancher 2.0 was just announced today, 100% Kubernetes-based https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16976934

[lloeki]

This will come at the right time for us, we've recently been spinning up our own k8s cluster on DO using kubeadm and flexvolume plugins, and are progressively migrating micro- and monolithic services in ascending order of criticality.

> tightly integrated into e.g. GitLab

Seconded, currently we set project integration up manually but since we're still ramping up that's not a cause of concern yet.

[ksajadi]

Sweet! Skycap also released the container delivery pipeline today. Can’t wait to use them together with DO Kubernetes. https://blog.cloud66.com/deploy-your-applications-to-any-kub...

[jasonrhaas]

Good for them! They beat AWS to it. Amazon's managed Kubernetes service is in the preview stage but should also be launched soon.

How do people like Kubernetes as a production ready solution to deploy containers? I've been using Docker for a while now, just starting to mess with k8s.

[benatkin]

> Amazon's managed Kubernetes service is in the preview stage but should also be launched soon.

Same as DO?

"DigitalOcean Kubernetes will be available through an early access program starting in June with general availability planned for later this year."

I'm not sure which will be first.

[ianwalter]

I resisted Kubernetes for a long time, but now that I've started using it, I think it's definitely the way to go.

[joshuatalb]

I have some questions, mainly around networking and the like. Is there somebody from DO that I can get in touch with directly? Thanks.

[al3xnull]

Second on the network. My concern is around inter-node traffic and if it's segmented or like their current private networking.

[geku]

We launched https://www.KubeBox.com beta today. You get a fully managed cluster, control plane and nodes. And you can start with a single node cluster with 8GB RAM and 2vCPU for $36/month. Additionally you can get Rancher auto-installed for managing projects, users, groups, permissions and workloads.

We are in early beta but if you are interested, please sign up and we will activate your account asap.

If you want to talk, we are at KubeCon Europe, contact @geku on Twitter.

[manishsharan]

@Linode -- you guys seeing this ? Don't make me migrate away after 2 years.

[Operyl]

If you enjoy having hypervisors disappear for 12 hours without notice, go ahead.

Until then, I'd say Linode is your better bet :).

EDIT: A little more information, I had two VMs go offline abruptly around 1am one night. It took 3 hours for Digital Ocean to even acknowledge a problem existed (I had opened a ticket), and that was only after I started poking their twitter account. It was at least 12 hours before they brought it back online, it was never acknowledged in any mass ticket. If you are unlucky enough, you can have the same thing unfortunately happen to you. This is my second experience of having such an outage at Digital Ocean and is, as a result, the reason I still only use DO as a testbed and nothing more.

EDIT2: Another pretty bad example of Digital Ocean: https://status.digitalocean.com/incidents/8sk3mbgp6jgl.

[acejam]

I had been a Linode customer since 2008 and recently migrated to DigitalOcean about 6 months ago. So far my DO experience has been flawless. I needed basic, reliable block storage and at the time, Linode had promised "it's coming" for years. I beta-tested the Linode block storage and it was not stable for me. At the end of the day, Linode has rock solid stability, but they are unfortunately too slow to develop new features, thus I simply had to move on.

[slig]

Linode user since 2009 here. Their support and network are rock solid [1].

I really hope they step up their game, but I won't be moving away anytime soon.

[1] The only major issue I had was a massive DDOS that took down their Atlanta data center around Christmas, couple of years ago.

[ausjke]

Linode user for the last 10+ years here, I'm migrating some sites to DO after checking it out recently(again), the UI is better and it seems DO innovates faster these days, and the stability might have improved too(need more time to verify this).

Linode has been solid for me, only one bad hardware crash in the last 10+ years, but DO has more functions, good UI, larger disk,etc. I am trying it again.

[ksec]

So, Kubernetes basically won? Nomad and Swarm don't stand a chance, but what about Mesos or DC/OS?

[jasonrhaas]

Everything I'm seeing right now in the market is saying that.. yes Kubernetes has won, or IS winning.

[tedmiston]

Mesosphere is still a player, but they have also recently added Kubernetes support in DC/OS.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/getting-started-guides/dcos/

[cytzol]

Kubernetes is the Git of container orchestration. It doesn't matter if any other products are better when k8s has, like, 99% of the mindshare!

[Already__Taken]

I don't know if nomad is going for the same problem is it? It seems a great deal simpler to use

[timwis]

Does digital ocean have any equivalent of aws' RDS? Or do I have to manage my own database server?

[mejamiewilson]

Jamie from DigitalOcean here. A database as a service offering is on our roadmap and in discovery, and we hope to have more information about this in the near future.

[devmunchies]

Fantastic. Any plans for a managed DB offering (Postgres) so the whole stack can be managed?

[segmondy]

Good, I have been debating between running my own k8s on DO vs GKE. I'm glad I don't have to build my own cluster. I think I'm going to do both for now tho. If DO is mature and stable I'll kill the GKE cluster.

[whitepoplar]

My only wish is for DO to allow customers to bring-your-own IP blocks. Vultr has this, but seems less robust to run a business on.

[ryanworl]

Check out packet.net if you haven’t already, they offer that and some other networking features you don’t see typically from VPS providers.

[ra1n85]

Why?

[vegardx]

How are you guys sorting out networking?

[mejamiewilson]

Jamie from DigitalOcean here. VPC is coming to DigitalOcean and the cluster will live within a VPC. Past that there are a lot of details! Is there something specific you're interested in?

[Rotareti]

I'm currently running multiple Kubernetes clusters using StackPoint in combination with DigitalOcean. This has been working very well. Could someone tell me how the new DO Kubernetes service compares to StackPoint?

[yebyen]

You're paying for master nodes with StackPoint, right? Each droplet you start has the same cost structure whether it's running your "user-land" slave workloads or if it's there just for running your cluster.

The big payoff (for small clusters like mine anyway) is that masters won't be charged, like other managed Kubernetes offerings from Azure and Google. I don't know enough about StackPoint to compare it to a service I haven't even seen in beta yet, but I can tell you that much.

I know that StackPoint is supposed to be "like a managed" experience. Maybe one of the DigitalOcean guys who has been responding in this thread can speak to the technical details of the new offering.

[mark_l_watson]

I have no experience setting up Kubernetes so at the start of the year I looked at setting up a cluster on AWS. There were lots of extra expenses for a small ‘learning cluster’.

I just signed up for early DO access - can’t wait!

[KenCochrane]

Too bad they didn't list the pricing, it would be nice to know how much it will cost, once released.

[mejamiewilson]

Hey KenCochrane, I’m the Product Manager on this product at DigitalOcean. VonGuard is right, you only pay for the worker nodes (based on our Droplet pricing, there’s no premium) and we take care of the master. Our standard pricing lives here: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

[VonGuard]

It's free. Just pay for nodes.

[eulid55]

Sounds like DO is going to have the cheapest k8s service out there!

[technofiend]

For some free lab time until the new commercial offerings arrive, try play with k8s: https://labs.play-with-k8s.com/