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laurowyn | 4 years ago
I think this is the key point. Kubernetes is great when used correctly, in the right scenario. And I feel that most of the hate comes from situations where it's not suitable. Kubernetes is just one of the many platforms available to run your code. My point extends to more systems, like Ansible, Chef and all the others. TL;DR it's not a tool for developers, it's a tool for operations and systems integrators.
A developer working on an application shouldn't care about the platform being run on, only defining its requirements - think big enterprise system that just consumes data, processes and stores it. The moment an engineer starts thinking "I need X platform" they're not developing the app anymore, they're integrating it too.
The system integrator should be able to take those requirements and match it to the right platform - choose the OS, native package vs container, scalability, fault tolerance etc. But the system integrator doesn't need to care about the long term maintenance of the platform, just how to integrate the application onto the platform. k8s can be considered here for long term support, ease of integration, portability etc.
The systems maintenance are responsible for ensuring the system has the resources to run the application and fix any faults that appear in the infrastructure - this is where k8s shines the most, because I can drain a node, update it and uncordon it without worrying about where I'm going to move the containers running on the node because k8s will do that for me. Gone are the days where we need to plan taking a machine offline for an hour, making sure the right failover procedures are in place, because k8s should be demonstrating that regularly.
Essentially, kubernetes/Ansible/etc. should not be a part of the development process. It doesn't solve problems that an application developer should care about. It's an operations tool, able to monitor and manage deployed applications. The hate occurs when the wrong people are using the tools, or the right people are using the tools incorrectly.
And of course, these kinds of separations of concern can only really happen in larger teams, on larger projects. Dedicating a few people to maintaining a deployment, a different group to continuous integration, and a 3rd group to actually developing the functionality. That's just not possible in every case, and the most hate seems to come from those in-between scenarios where there's too many people to call it a small team, but too few to enable this separation of concern. Meanwhile, the most love seems to come from those that can differentiate between the many hats they need to wear in a small team.
KronisLV|4 years ago
This feels like a statement that begs more discussion because it's an interesting argument, albeit probably a polarizing one as well.
My experience has been the complete opposite to this - when developers also think about how the app will run, the outcomes will be the best.
No system runs in a vacuum or exists separate of its runtime environments, so attempts to decouple those could lead to countless problems and inconsistencies down the road. For example, if you create a Java app that expects configuration to come from XML files, this may cause difficulty with containerization and won't follow the best practices anymore. If you create an app that stores session data in memory instead of Redis, then it won't be horizontally scalable. Same for shared data, like using the file system for something - that will create a lot of problems with multiple instances vs using something like S3.
Even if you don't pick the platform yourself, you should make sure that the app integrates with it smoothly, hence the 12 Factor App principles can help for many of these cases.
> Essentially, kubernetes/Ansible/etc. should not be a part of the development process. It doesn't solve problems that an application developer should care about. It's an operations tool, able to monitor and manage deployed applications. The hate occurs when the wrong people are using the tools, or the right people are using the tools incorrectly.
In my experience, this leads to knowledge silos, problematic communication, not thinking about Ops concerns during development either due to a missing set of skills or just not caring due to a lack of ownership about the outcome, and just generally a slowed down pace of development.
Now, there probably is a lot of benefit in specialization (e.g. Ops specialists that consult across different teams and projects to make everything more consistent), but in my eyes everyone should know a bit of everything and communicate freely.
If you don't do that, developers use ORMs in their apps and create N+1 problems or large amounts of DB calls due to a lack of joins or no consideration for indices because they're not DBAs after all, other times people don't bother with instrumentation in their apps and introduce problems with proxying configuration due to not caring about the ingress will look like etc.
I actually recall seeing an issue at work about an Ops related problem, recommended a few steps to take care of it, whereas the responsible dev simply told me: "That's not in my job description, i just write Java."
Now, not making people learn about an extremely vast array of topics and spend evenings/weekends doing so would also be nice, but then again, that person didn't solve the issue, i did. The end result is what matters, optimizing the road to it is up to the people in control.
That said, "rockstar devs" or "DevOps" specialists (or whatever the current term is) also carry risks in regards to a low bus factor (everything hinging on them in certain orgs, vs spreading the knowledge), so it's all probably pretty situational and scalable to different degrees.
laurowyn|4 years ago
Absolutely agree, but that becomes "engineering" in my view. I'm talking specifically about implementing functionality, not long term views and project direction etc.
> Even if you don't pick the platform yourself, you should make sure that the app integrates with it smoothly, hence the 12 Factor App principles can help for many of these cases.
Which is the role of the system integrator - to integrate the app with the platform it's to be run on.
> In my experience, this leads to knowledge silos, problematic communication, not thinking about Ops concerns during development either due to a missing set of skills or just not caring due to a lack of ownership about the outcome, and just generally a slowed down pace of development. > Now, there probably is a lot of benefit in specialization (e.g. Ops specialists that consult across different teams and projects to make everything more consistent), but in my eyes everyone should know a bit of everything and communicate freely
Absolutely agree. And I hate that this happens, which is why I try to learn about all levels of the tech stack and not just one domain. But I do feel like this is a people problem, not a tech problem or project problem.
If the team cannot communicate effectively, they're never going to produce the best product, regardless of who knows what, budgets, etc. Ultimately, these roles aren't a waterfall structure. Developers shouldn't throw things over the fence to system integrators, and similar to operations.
Instead, the whole team works together, in the same space, on the same backlog. If ops has a problem, it gets prioritised on the backlog. If developers are unsure of how to approach something, they talk to the integration or ops people. In an ideal world, the teams would rotate between roles regularly, so that everybody is aware of the issues being faced that can't be seen from elsewhere.
Based purely on my own experience, far too much priority is put on budget constraints and making money instead of making a product that a customer actually wants. And this often leads to the one person, many hats issue, which then cascades into a mashup of roles and chasing our tails. I've had a lot more success on projects where we've clearly defined who owns which layers of the stack than when the team are just left to fend for themselves.
> That said, "rockstar devs" or "DevOps" specialists (or whatever the current term is) also carry risks in regards to a low bus factor (everything hinging on them in certain orgs, vs spreading the knowledge), so it's all probably pretty situational and scalable to different degrees
Specialists absolutely have their place, but are not a fixed requirement. Just because a project chooses k8s, doesn't mean it needs a k8s guru to own that layer, merely that the project needs some knowledge in that area to assess the scale required and make the call on keeping it small and manageable, or getting a consultant in for a short time to design and upskill the team, or getting a dedicated DevOps person to make the impossible happen.
But again, there's no reason why all of this couldn't happen with a team size of 1, with that 1 person wearing many hats. The important thing in those situations is knowing which hat is which and prioritising appropriately. My suggestion is a high level model that can be morphed to fit the situation, not a fixed framework that everybody must follow until the end of time.