Don't Use Kubernetes, Yet

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • kops

    Kubernetes Operations (kOps) - Production Grade k8s Installation, Upgrades and Management

    I highly recommend the kops[1] tool from Kubernetes if opting to deploy/manage Kubernetes yourself. I’ve had great experiences with it in the past (have been using since before EKS or Fargate existed).

    kops let’s you define your Kubernetes cluster in yaml, then can deploy directly or output terraform that you can use to deploy.

    1. https://github.com/kubernetes/kops

  • libaws

    aws should be easy

    i find managing aws and ec2 with their provided sdks via lambda on a 1 minute timer to be a good in between.

    example:

    https://github.com/nathants/libaws/tree/master/examples/comp...

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • Portainer

    Making Docker and Kubernetes management easy.

    A few years, I would have said no. Now, I'm cautiously optimistic about it.

    Personally, I think that you can use something like Rancher (https://rancher.com/) or Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) for easier management and/or dashboard functionality, to make the learning curve a bit more approachable. For example, you can create a deployment through the UI by following a wizard that also offers you configuration that you might want to use (e.g. resource limits) and then later retrieve the YAML manifest, should you wish to do that. They also make interacting with Helm charts (pre-made packages) more easy.

    Furthermore, there are certified distributions which are not too resource hungry, especially if you need to self-host clusters, for example K3s (https://k3s.io/) and k0s (https://k0sproject.io/) are both production ready up to a certain scale, don't consume a lot of memory, are easy to setup and work with whilst being mostly OS agnostic (DEB distros will always work best, RPM ones have challenges as soon as you look elsewhere instead of at OpenShift, which is probably only good for enterprises).

    If you can automated cluster setup with Ansible and treat the clusters as something that you can easily re-deploy when you inevitably screw up (you might not do that, but better to plan for failure), you should be good! Even Helm charts have gotten pretty easy to write and deploy and K8s works nicely with most CI/CD tools out there, given that kubectl lends itself pretty well to scripting.

  • rancher

    Complete container management platform

    A few years, I would have said no. Now, I'm cautiously optimistic about it.

    Personally, I think that you can use something like Rancher (https://rancher.com/) or Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) for easier management and/or dashboard functionality, to make the learning curve a bit more approachable. For example, you can create a deployment through the UI by following a wizard that also offers you configuration that you might want to use (e.g. resource limits) and then later retrieve the YAML manifest, should you wish to do that. They also make interacting with Helm charts (pre-made packages) more easy.

    Furthermore, there are certified distributions which are not too resource hungry, especially if you need to self-host clusters, for example K3s (https://k3s.io/) and k0s (https://k0sproject.io/) are both production ready up to a certain scale, don't consume a lot of memory, are easy to setup and work with whilst being mostly OS agnostic (DEB distros will always work best, RPM ones have challenges as soon as you look elsewhere instead of at OpenShift, which is probably only good for enterprises).

    If you can automated cluster setup with Ansible and treat the clusters as something that you can easily re-deploy when you inevitably screw up (you might not do that, but better to plan for failure), you should be good! Even Helm charts have gotten pretty easy to write and deploy and K8s works nicely with most CI/CD tools out there, given that kubectl lends itself pretty well to scripting.

  • k3s

    Lightweight Kubernetes

    A few years, I would have said no. Now, I'm cautiously optimistic about it.

    Personally, I think that you can use something like Rancher (https://rancher.com/) or Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) for easier management and/or dashboard functionality, to make the learning curve a bit more approachable. For example, you can create a deployment through the UI by following a wizard that also offers you configuration that you might want to use (e.g. resource limits) and then later retrieve the YAML manifest, should you wish to do that. They also make interacting with Helm charts (pre-made packages) more easy.

    Furthermore, there are certified distributions which are not too resource hungry, especially if you need to self-host clusters, for example K3s (https://k3s.io/) and k0s (https://k0sproject.io/) are both production ready up to a certain scale, don't consume a lot of memory, are easy to setup and work with whilst being mostly OS agnostic (DEB distros will always work best, RPM ones have challenges as soon as you look elsewhere instead of at OpenShift, which is probably only good for enterprises).

    If you can automated cluster setup with Ansible and treat the clusters as something that you can easily re-deploy when you inevitably screw up (you might not do that, but better to plan for failure), you should be good! Even Helm charts have gotten pretty easy to write and deploy and K8s works nicely with most CI/CD tools out there, given that kubectl lends itself pretty well to scripting.

  • k9s

    🐶 Kubernetes CLI To Manage Your Clusters In Style!

    Thanks!

    Of course, things might change somewhat in the next years, we have seen both new tooling be developed and become viable, like Lens (https://k8slens.dev/) and some nice CLI tooling, like k9s (https://k9scli.io/), as well as numerous other options.

    Though I guess things won't change as much for Docker Swarm (which is feature complete and doesn't have much new stuff be developed for it) or Hashicorp Nomad (because their "HashiStack" covers most of what you need already).

  • lens

    Lens - The way the world runs Kubernetes

    Thanks!

    Of course, things might change somewhat in the next years, we have seen both new tooling be developed and become viable, like Lens (https://k8slens.dev/) and some nice CLI tooling, like k9s (https://k9scli.io/), as well as numerous other options.

    Though I guess things won't change as much for Docker Swarm (which is feature complete and doesn't have much new stuff be developed for it) or Hashicorp Nomad (because their "HashiStack" covers most of what you need already).

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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