If you’re running containers you’ll want some kind of container management - but I’ve been fine with ECS for running on AWS. It’s well integrated, standard enough, configurable via OpenTofu/Terraform/CloudFormation etc and free for container hosts running in AWS
Do I need it? No. Do I want to use it because of the superior tooling? Yes.
Honestly. Give yourself a month to learn it and migrate your home lab and it's actually not too difficult. Yes it takes a lot of debugging initially, but like most things, once you're familiar, it becomes easy.
The fact that another engineer stands a chance of being able to see my cluster & have some basic idea how it works—that a k8s system self describes itself fairly well— is a superpower. Even if it remains yours and only yours, having a common reference frame to discuss your computing adventures in, being able to break out the great pieces others have made: it's so much more compelling to me than cobbling together your one off special pet of a system.
I use Rancher for a hosted Kubernetes cluster on top of dozens of dedicated servers, and so far, it has been super nice. What are the alternatives for CI/CD for a small team (30)?
k3s is dead simple to install. Install rancher on top if you like a nice web GUI, or don't if you are fine with kubectl. The software you want to run on k8s probably has helm charts which make it easy to run.
I initiated and led the Kubernetes adoption at the startup I'm with currently. Handed it off to the new ops team recently. The company is dramatically better off now in terms of scaling, deployment automation, configuration management, service discovery, internal service interactions, stability, reliability... The list goes on.
If your needs are met by a VM or three then sure, you may not need Kubernetes, although as other comments have pointed out, distributions like k3s can be useful even in those environments. But as you climb the scale and complexity ladder, there soon comes a point where it's very hard to beat Kubernetes, which is why it has become so widespread.
I did the same with managed services and they're in a better place than they would have been with k8s - which is where they started and had to be rescued from... It had become an inescapable gravity well of pointless busy work. It isn't about the tooling, it's knowing the business.
I use to believe that too until someone rightfully reminded me of all of the ugly solutions I’ve used over the years to deploy to VMs. Then I became a big believer in always containerizing.
This is the insight. You'll a worse job even for something as certificate management with letsencrypt. Let alone all the other stuff. If your workload doesn't need that, and you are fine with some downtime, then and only then don't do it.
You don't need kubernetes in the same way you don't need a fast internet service. Sure you can work with dial up, but working with 1gbps internet line is just so much more convenient
pg ruled on this category of post over 16 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735568
If you’re running containers you’ll want some kind of container management - but I’ve been fine with ECS for running on AWS. It’s well integrated, standard enough, configurable via OpenTofu/Terraform/CloudFormation etc and free for container hosts running in AWS
Do I need it? No. Do I want to use it because of the superior tooling? Yes.
Honestly. Give yourself a month to learn it and migrate your home lab and it's actually not too difficult. Yes it takes a lot of debugging initially, but like most things, once you're familiar, it becomes easy.
The fact that another engineer stands a chance of being able to see my cluster & have some basic idea how it works—that a k8s system self describes itself fairly well— is a superpower. Even if it remains yours and only yours, having a common reference frame to discuss your computing adventures in, being able to break out the great pieces others have made: it's so much more compelling to me than cobbling together your one off special pet of a system.
I use Rancher for a hosted Kubernetes cluster on top of dozens of dedicated servers, and so far, it has been super nice. What are the alternatives for CI/CD for a small team (30)?
k3s is dead simple to install. Install rancher on top if you like a nice web GUI, or don't if you are fine with kubectl. The software you want to run on k8s probably has helm charts which make it easy to run.
I initiated and led the Kubernetes adoption at the startup I'm with currently. Handed it off to the new ops team recently. The company is dramatically better off now in terms of scaling, deployment automation, configuration management, service discovery, internal service interactions, stability, reliability... The list goes on.
If your needs are met by a VM or three then sure, you may not need Kubernetes, although as other comments have pointed out, distributions like k3s can be useful even in those environments. But as you climb the scale and complexity ladder, there soon comes a point where it's very hard to beat Kubernetes, which is why it has become so widespread.
I did the same with managed services and they're in a better place than they would have been with k8s - which is where they started and had to be rescued from... It had become an inescapable gravity well of pointless busy work. It isn't about the tooling, it's knowing the business.
I use to believe that too until someone rightfully reminded me of all of the ugly solutions I’ve used over the years to deploy to VMs. Then I became a big believer in always containerizing.
This is the insight. You'll a worse job even for something as certificate management with letsencrypt. Let alone all the other stuff. If your workload doesn't need that, and you are fine with some downtime, then and only then don't do it.
You don't need kubernetes in the same way you don't need a fast internet service. Sure you can work with dial up, but working with 1gbps internet line is just so much more convenient