[HN Gopher] Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, acco...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new
       report
        
       Author : eminemence
       Score  : 110 points
       Date   : 2021-06-29 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
        
       | tyingq wrote:
       | _" Less than 25 per cent of those surveyed said they could
       | accurately predict how much they'd spend on Kubernetes to within
       | 5 per cent of actual cost."_
       | 
       | The premise seems off to me. Of course people have a hard time
       | predicting the cost of an autoscaling infrastructure that they
       | haven't had for a long time.
       | 
       | Presumably they moved off of a fixed size infrastructure to get
       | to Kubernetes. Where they were either paying for excess capacity
       | on some days, or paying in the form of poor performance when
       | demand exceeded supply.
       | 
       | Five percent accuracy seems like a high bar, and you would want a
       | year or two to understand your seasonality and growth rate, etc.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Decker87 wrote:
         | Geez, We can barely predict anything within 5%.
        
       | frompdx wrote:
       | The headline seems a bit hyperbolic after reading the article.
       | The bar chart has the caption _Accurate prediction of Kubernetes
       | costs is a challenge_. However, the chart shows that one in five
       | respondents represented in the data don 't bother to predict
       | their costs at all. Over half can predict within 10%, which seems
       | fairly reasonable even if there is room for improvement. That
       | leaves the remaining 20% who really are struggling to accurately
       | predict their costs with better accuracy than 25%.
       | 
       | The trouble with all of this is that it doesn't really account
       | for how the respondents use Kubernetes. What type of workloads
       | are they running and how variable are those workloads? Would the
       | organizations struggling to predict costs still struggle using
       | another solution if their workloads are highly variable? Are they
       | trading fixed costs for scalability in the face of those variable
       | workloads? It's certainly possible to set upper bounds to
       | autoscaling and to run fixed sized workloads in Kubernetes.
       | 
       | Perhaps the best takeaway from the article is that there is an
       | opportunity to develop better cost management tools or offer
       | consulting services in this domain. I know there are a few
       | companies out there hoping to offer services in this space
       | already.
        
       | StratusBen wrote:
       | Disclaimer: I'm Co-Founder and CEO at https://vantage.sh/ - a
       | cloud cost transparency platform.
       | 
       | We have been hearing this a lot from our customers who use EKS.
       | They are running single clusters as shared infrastructure so have
       | no insight into which workloads are contributing the most costs.
       | This is true with other shared infra like data pipelines.
       | 
       | We are currently working on a solution for pod-level cost
       | insights if anyone is interested in signing up for the beta shoot
       | an email to ben@vantage.sh
        
       | moksly wrote:
       | I think the articles headline is a little rude to Kubernetes. I'm
       | by no means a fan of Kubernetes, especially not in non-tech
       | enterprise, but the article is really about the unpredictable and
       | rising cost of moving into the cloud that is owned by the big
       | tech companies, isn't it? Sure kubernetes can be part of that,
       | but you can easily run into the same predicament without it.
       | 
       | The unpredictability of cost is actually the prime reason we
       | stuck to our own cloud, where we rent (technically we buy the
       | hardware that the company hosts, but it's not really ours, we
       | just use it till it breaks) the iron at a known rate. Which is
       | just better for a public sector budget than paying by mileage, at
       | least if anyone outside of the IT department bothers to look into
       | what they are signing off on.
       | 
       | The really interesting part will be where we go from here. Moving
       | from self-hosted to rented iron that we run our virtual servers
       | on, was a fairly simple move that would be easy to reverse. The
       | move into the cloud is even easier, but unless you're careful, it
       | could be very costly to get out.
        
         | bogota wrote:
         | Unfortunately AWS is the new oracle. No one ever gets in
         | trouble for picking it and its a great way to make it look like
         | you as a high up exec provide value. Look how fast we are
         | iterating now with my decision. It almost always ends in a mess
         | of unmaintainable unthought out services that someone else has
         | to come and clean up or move to the next proprietary service.
         | 
         | The last 5 years for me has been soul crushing as someone who
         | actually enjoys managing datacenters. We have seen time and
         | time again having your own DC leads to much better visibility
         | and control on spending as well as lower cost. Not to mention
         | the huge advantage when negotiating with cloud vendors if you
         | are a mid size or up company.
         | 
         | So time and time again i have had to transition out of
         | environments you can reason about into AWS and become a
         | glorified support engineer but i guess thats what companies
         | need now days. Someone who will read docs the other engineers
         | dont want to and troubleshoot all the issues because AWS is so
         | easy.
         | 
         | Im glad I got to learn how the "cloud" works though as i likely
         | never would have been drawn to infra and programming in this
         | day and age.
        
           | Retric wrote:
           | Many people have been fired after AWS migrations resulted in
           | massive cost increases. But, few people want to talk about
           | failed projects at hospitals etc where the cloud is a poor
           | fit.
           | 
           | IT has always had issues with people cargo cutting solutions
           | without understanding the details, and the cloud is no
           | different.
        
             | bogota wrote:
             | I agree its just the current one that affects me. We did
             | have someone get fired from an AWS migration at my first
             | startup but they just turned around and tried to do again.
             | It took one year for a single application that only lived
             | on a single server and we never did anything more advanced
             | before we sold.
        
           | Jochim wrote:
           | The problem with running your own DC is growing past your
           | planned capacity. There's often a huge delay between
           | developers having to put up with the VM infrastructure having
           | to put up with under-resourced machines and more capacity
           | being approved.
           | 
           | As a developer I've put up with over-subscribed VMware clouds
           | and I vastly prefer the Azure/AWS option.
        
             | bogota wrote:
             | Their are a lot of bad ways to run your own hardware.
             | Limiting your infra to EC2 for burst capacity provides an
             | easy escape hatch if you need. However i have never run
             | into the issue of not calculating CPU capacity properly and
             | also would never use VM ware that sounds like IT is running
             | your DC. I could see this being the case for some tiny
             | startup who just owns a small amount of rack space though.
             | 
             | Of course you can pay the cloud providers to deal with your
             | companies bad planning. Thats what most do.
             | 
             | I also would never advocate for DC for everything. As a
             | startup it likely makes no sense to run your own hardware
             | and also likely doesnt make sense to run k8s also however
             | one of those is completely acceptable. Once you get to more
             | predictable growth owning your own hardware starts to look
             | more attractive but most don't know how to calculate it
             | properly and finance likes to make it merky with capex and
             | opex buckets.
        
           | thanatos519 wrote:
           | I recently experienced this firsthand, in a company which
           | owned no computers beyond employee laptops. The product was
           | entirely built of AWS services created by a pile of Terraform
           | spaghetti. It was only really understood by someone whose
           | superpower was the ability to keep an apparently unlimited
           | number of levels of indirection in his head.
           | 
           | I hear they might need to move it all to Azure soon!
        
             | clipradiowallet wrote:
             | > I hear they might need to move it all to Azure soon!
             | 
             | I'm not sure if you made that post as a joke or not...but
             | you just described a certain San Francisco based startup
             | that operates in the SPF/DKIM/DMARC space...
             | 
             | Which company (if you can say) were you describing?
        
             | bogota wrote:
             | Terraform just does too much and is abused. Its great for
             | simple config but quickly turns into custom modules to make
             | things easier. Eventually those modules need to change and
             | stuff breaks but you never know until someone trys to run
             | it again. Then you just pray no one trys to manage their
             | database with it.
             | 
             | Additionally as its put together over time if you actually
             | had to re create the environment it would never work. I
             | spent time automating recreating an environment and quickly
             | stopped. Terraform is the illusion of infra as code and
             | fails miserably at any scale.
        
         | sleepybrett wrote:
         | When we pushed a bunch of teams at a large retailer from ec2 to
         | kubernetes in ec2 (not eks) we reduced overall cloud spend by
         | ~30%.
         | 
         | It's only unpredictable and unquantifiable if you don't look at
         | it. Is the problem that they don't have the right tools to look
         | at it yet?
        
           | twalla wrote:
           | The flip side of this is I was able to reduce an employers
           | cloud spend by 80 percent by just _fixing_ the mistakes they
           | made when migrating to kubernetes. We were still on k8s
           | afterwards, its just that the first pass made a bunch naive
           | assumptions and poor optimizations.
        
         | dan_quixote wrote:
         | Are those of us happy/comfortable with current major cloud
         | offerings simply not speaking up here? I can't fathom running a
         | data center any longer for a company of nearly any size. Given
         | my team's responsibilities, this would require 2-3x more
         | headcount with significantly worse SLA/SLO if we still ran our
         | own datacenter. Maybe it's not such a big deal for places with
         | constant demand? Or is this just a case of observer bias?
        
           | Agingcoder wrote:
           | It depends on what you do.
           | 
           | Cloud boxes are insanely expensive (easily 10x the price of
           | the equivalent in house box, taking hosting, power, cooling,
           | hw into account).
           | 
           | To make this work, you need a combination of variable demand,
           | and only paying for partial salaries (your cloud boxes are
           | mutualized with other people's boxes).
           | 
           | If you're a reasonably big company (tens of thousands of
           | servers) , with fairly stable demand, and adequate capacity
           | planning, you won't necessarily save a huge amount of money
           | by outsourcing your DCs. You can argue that the gcp/aws guys
           | are better than you at running fleets of servers and data
           | centers , but at 10x the price, it's worth double checking.
           | If all I do is raw compute 100% of the time on a very large
           | scale, it's extremely likely I want to do it myself.
           | 
           | Obviously, there's more than raw hardware to the cloud,
           | starting with all kinds of managed services, which can be
           | worth it. Again , you'll have to do the maths :10x for the
           | boxes, then extra for the distributed db? Does it give me a
           | competitive advantage? Better time to market?
           | 
           | In the end, there are good use cases, and bad use cases for
           | the cloud, and I don't think it's as clear cut as what you
           | say.
           | 
           | EDIT : if cloud hardware prices were not completely
           | ridiculous (say 2x), then it might suddenly be a lot more
           | compelling, and I would most likely agree with you (security
           | / regulatory issues aside).
        
         | reedciccio wrote:
         | Renting the hardware is not necessarily a cost-saving measure
         | though: how much of the compute/storage capacity you have is
         | sitting idle in your datacenter? That's the whole point of
         | finops: you need to have full visibility into the usage of your
         | infrastructure so you can optimize the spend.
        
           | tomc1985 wrote:
           | Still amazing to me that keeping capacity in reserve is now
           | demonized
        
           | joana035 wrote:
           | Gosh, there is job title for capacity planning?
        
             | reedciccio wrote:
             | do capacity planners buy and sell capacity to scale up and
             | down month to month? :)
        
               | Gravityloss wrote:
               | When does the need ever go down?
        
               | cortesoft wrote:
               | What company has constant load 24/7/365?
        
               | dcow wrote:
               | I'm going to guess Visa.
        
               | mateo411 wrote:
               | I'm sure they still see time of day effects, day of week
               | effects, month of year effects.
        
               | jen20 wrote:
               | At night, often. For example, I have had a use case where
               | we needed a 1000 node build farm during the day when
               | developers were working, but only 50 at night. Machine
               | learning jobs are another common source of workloads that
               | need burst capacity.
        
               | jonfw wrote:
               | If you're retail, it goes down after xmas. If you're a
               | tax company, it goes down after may. If you sell a
               | product, it goes down when you go long enough without
               | releasing anything new
        
           | wffurr wrote:
           | OP didn't say anything about cost saving but rather
           | predictability.
        
       | punkrex wrote:
       | A lot of the "finops" practitioners I've seen are myopically
       | focused on tagging of AWS resources; and that falls to pieces
       | with kubernetes because AWS can't see inside the kubernetes
       | clusters.
       | 
       | I'm not surprised they don't like it.
        
         | cogman10 wrote:
         | Yup. Particularly because k8s scales based on whole system
         | load, not single app load. It's harder to predict because it's
         | better at optimizing resource utilization and ultimately
         | lowering costs.
        
           | briffle wrote:
           | You can scale load on many things in more recent versions of
           | K8s. for example, pubsub depth of un-acked messages, or
           | custom metrics in prometheus format.
           | 
           | https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-
           | engine/docs/tutorials/au...
        
         | sleepybrett wrote:
         | I just had a meeting with a 'finops' manager where i showed him
         | how kubernetes has a similar tagging structure (labels) and how
         | we can break down per team pricing based on cpu/memory
         | utilization.
         | 
         | It's not hard, you just need the tools (kubecost, etc)
        
           | cobookman wrote:
           | pod A uses 2 cores, pod B uses 1 core. Machine has 4 cores
           | and all remaining unscheduled pods require 2 cores.
           | 
           | How do you attribute the partial usage of the node? Is it 2
           | cores billed to pod A, 1 core billed to pod B, and 1 core
           | billed to some random team?
           | 
           | Or do you have 2/3 of Node billed to pod A and 1/3 of Node
           | billed to Pod B.
           | 
           | Now deal with this permutation across all the various
           | variables.
        
             | orf wrote:
             | You do it roughly based on the deployment requests and the
             | average HPA values throughout a time slice.
             | 
             | Most k8s workloads run on a homogenous set of node types,
             | so you can have an hourly cost per gb and per vcpu without
             | digging too much into it.
        
       | WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
       | I have experienced first hand several cases of k8s gone wrong. In
       | the end I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't
       | really need the complexity of k8s.
       | 
       | Seriously, most k8s projects I have been involved with required
       | so much effort to bootstrap and keep it going, it just blew me
       | away! The experience for the average developer was just
       | frustrating and infuriating: AWS ECS to the rescue!
       | 
       | Some will argue: vendor lock in! Really? I bet most services out
       | there are already vendor locked in, just go with the flow and
       | make your life easier.
       | 
       | I have seen companies failing because investing so much in
       | building infrastructure, supposly vendor lock in free (or so they
       | thought) that they lost sight and did not invest enough building
       | the actual product: no revenue -> party is over.
       | 
       | Don't make the same mistake.
        
         | flowerlad wrote:
         | > _most companies don 't really need the complexity of k8s_
         | 
         | If you want to run a complex service consisting of multiple
         | microservices, auto scaling and so on, nothing beats
         | Kubernetes. But you're right, most small businesses just need a
         | simple web site, and for them, an Amazon Lightsail VM might
         | suffice.
        
           | rantwasp wrote:
           | yeah, nothing beats K8s except you know... maybe serverless.
           | or maybe cloud primitives that are already there and are
           | handled by someone else.
           | 
           | IMHO, unless you have a huge fleet of bare metal machines K8s
           | is an overhead you don't need
        
         | imnotjames wrote:
         | ECS trades kubernetes manifests and generalized tools for
         | cloudformation or the AWS UI, though..
         | 
         | Most everything else seems to be the same thing as if you ran
         | with EKS, just different names for everything.
         | 
         | Setting it up yourself, though, no, I wouldn't do that unless I
         | had a large enough team to maintain it.
        
           | WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
           | > ECS trades kubernetes manifests and generalized tools for
           | cloudformation or the AWS UI, though..
           | 
           | Terraform has served me well, it does come with some pain as
           | well, but nothing compared to k8s.
        
         | 908B64B197 wrote:
         | > I have seen companies failing because investing so much in
         | building infrastructure, supposly vendor lock in free (or so
         | they thought) that they lost sight and did not invest enough
         | building the actual product: no revenue -> party is over.
         | 
         | How was the stock comp for engineers at these companies?
        
           | WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
           | late stage "startup" who had struggled with growth for years,
           | they thought they needed to invest in building a more complex
           | system and infrastructure, and they hired tons of engs (who
           | actually had literally nothing to do) ...
           | 
           | instead what they really needed was to focus on their
           | customers and build them a useful product that simply worked.
           | They spent months building and deploying their own k8s
           | cluster: EKS was "vendor lock in" so that wasn't a good
           | choice for them, but guess what, all their infrastructure was
           | already running in AWS anyway and their product was already
           | vendor locked in: RDS, S3, etc ...
           | 
           | also ... to make things even more complex, they thought they
           | needed to go all-in super distributed micro services: it took
           | literally months to get new "services" up and running in
           | production. It was a s*t show!
           | 
           | One of the many story of let's break the monolith, embrace
           | microservice, thus k8s ... gone horribly wrong.
           | 
           | Eventually most engs left ....
        
             | rantwasp wrote:
             | > Eventually most engs left ....
             | 
             | and now have k8s on their resume. Bazinga!
        
             | 908B64B197 wrote:
             | > but guess what, all their infrastructure was already
             | running in AWS anyway and their product was already vendor
             | locked in: RDS, S3, etc ...
             | 
             | I laughed, but your response doesn't answer my question
             | regarding engineers comp.
        
               | WYepQ4dNnG wrote:
               | stock options, not great
        
       | tristor wrote:
       | I think this headline is hyperbole, but also somewhat true, but
       | not for any fault of Kubernetes. I've worked in this space
       | extensively, and have been called in to consult in some variety
       | or another on a number of large enterprise Kubernetes
       | deployments. Nearly universally I found the following things to
       | be true:
       | 
       | 1. Companies had critical infrastructure for the success of
       | Kubernetes owned by teams that opposed deploying Kubernetes
       | 
       | 2. The primary person shepherding Kubernetes into the company's
       | environment had not done their due diligence on what were
       | appropriate workloads for Kubernetes and what were not and how
       | applications would integrate across mixed environments when
       | required.
       | 
       | 3. The principal tech resources at the company were not educated
       | about containerization, Kubernetes, and the intricacies of
       | container networking but were on the hook internally for the
       | implementation.
       | 
       | What ends up driving the "black hole of unpredictable spend" is
       | that companies are sold (either internally or externally) on a
       | relatively short migration timeframe, but that timeframe is
       | contingent on the company having appropriate infrastructure,
       | staffing, and no key persons internally blocking said migration.
       | If any factor is out of whack the migration timeline can quickly
       | approach infinite.
       | 
       | While it is true that there are startups that could run
       | everything they need for their first 10k customers on 5 VMs w/
       | Nginx & MySQL that decide to build grandiose environments in
       | Kubernetes they don't need. The opposite is also true, which is
       | that there are huge enterprises who could in reality massively
       | benefit from Kubernetes in their environment but for "political"
       | reasons can't get it done even after spending millions of
       | dollars, so are stuck mired in their "legacy" environments.
       | Networking, in particular, is a huge barrier of entry for
       | enterprise Kubernetes deployments and are almost always stymied
       | by people, not technology, because most enterprises have some
       | Boomer network admin who doesn't actually know anything about
       | networking but only knows about Cisco gear running things.
       | 
       | So, what do companies do? They go to AWS or GCP and they just run
       | up a /massive/ bill, as they very very slowly migrate (often
       | rewrite) their legacy systems to the cloud. This is of course
       | astronomically and unnecessarily expensive, but it's generally
       | not the fault of the underlying technology. AWS and Google are
       | happy to bilk major enterprises as well, and often sell them a
       | bill of goods they can't deliver on.
        
       | gnivol wrote:
       | This is not counting the people costs involved, kube experts
       | ain't cheap. Complexity is only going up.
       | 
       | Suggestion for next article -> "Software a black hole of
       | unpredictable spend"
        
         | ferdowsi wrote:
         | From the application engineer side I'm not convinced that
         | Kubernetes is particularly complex. I recently ramped up on it
         | and found it liberating, frankly. Once I understood the basic
         | concepts it was much more sensible than staring at a mountain
         | of bespoke Ansible scripts operating on components I could
         | barely see or understand.
         | 
         | I can't speak to the SRE side; I can imagine the complexity
         | there. But are these challenges greater than maintaining,
         | observing, and modifying a Rube Goldberg machine of managed AWS
         | services?
        
           | bostonsre wrote:
           | There is a large amount of stuff to learn about how to do
           | stuff the kubernetes way but yea, it's just a tool to run
           | isolated processes across a fleet of servers. You can make a
           | mess in ec2 and in kubernetes and I don't see much if any
           | additional complexity to costs associated to running
           | kubernetes. It is friggin gorgeous and elegant when comparing
           | it to something like hadoop. Spark on kubernetes has been a
           | dream compared to writing automation that used cloudera or
           | ambari hadoop management layers.
        
           | twalla wrote:
           | From the SRE side: if you need bespoke fancy shit (we write a
           | lot of operators to remove toil from running things we'd
           | typically do with ansible/manually), the kubernetes API, CRDs
           | and the operator/controller pattern are a joy to develop
           | against for the most part.
        
           | clipradiowallet wrote:
           | > I can't speak to the SRE side
           | 
           | In all seriousness, what _other_ side is there? The SRE 's
           | role is to make sure you never encounter kubernetes. eg...
           | you have a git repo and some branches - if you push to them,
           | deployments magically happen. As a non-SRE, what parts of
           | kubernetes would you actually be touching or interacting
           | with?
        
           | jansommer wrote:
           | Had the exact same experience. Was planning to use Ansible
           | until it became obvious that Kubernetes was a perfect match,
           | and it was fairly easy to learn the basics. Getting it to run
           | correctly within our VPC was a pain for the developer doing
           | that part though.
        
           | KurtMueller wrote:
           | I have a basic Ruby on Rails app up on Kube but with no
           | authentication and no SSL certificate. What should I learn
           | next to add these things? How did you learn these things?
        
             | scns wrote:
             | Use Traefik as your Ingress, done.
        
               | scns wrote:
               | Correcton: for TLS, Auth still has tbd.
               | 
               | Cant edit since on mobile
        
               | dcow wrote:
               | Just refresh the page the edit button should reappear on
               | mobile.
        
             | fimbulvetr wrote:
             | Maybe using cert-manager & ingress-nginx to front the
             | service with SSL. Then your ingress-nginx will front your
             | ruby app and decorate it with ssl. Please note, and I am
             | embarrassed it took me so long to figure out - there are
             | two nginx ingress projects - "nginx-ingress" and "ingress-
             | nginx"! I would strongly recommend using the k8s official
             | one, which is ingress-nginx. See:
             | https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
             | set-...
             | 
             | This will help you learn the ingress pattern. After that, I
             | would suggest exploring ways to tack a sidecar on (log
             | aggregator, etc) - my impression is you are just looking
             | for things to learn, I wouldn't normally suggest doing this
             | just to do it.
             | 
             | Alternatively, you could try exploring putting
             | grafana/prometheus in, though this can be a big bite for
             | someone learning, so I would recommend
             | learning/comprehending sidecars/ingress, etc as they are
             | some of the building blocks for k8s.
             | 
             | Edit: I see there's another comment for traefik for ingress
             | - that's fine too, it's the concept that matters, not your
             | particular choice. If you have a lot of trouble
             | implementing one, try the other one, things you learn in
             | your journey will help quite a bit.
        
           | gizdan wrote:
           | I have been on both sides of the stick.
           | 
           | At a previous place we set up a cluster on AWS. This was
           | before EKS. We started out with kops initially but later used
           | the generated CFN yaml. It was not an easy feat. There was a
           | lot of gotchas, moving pieces and much more. All of these
           | moving pieces had their own gotchas. Plus lots of competition
           | in the area with not a lot of comparisons since it was early
           | days. Many things were not fully stable. A lot of issues. We
           | got there in the end, but it wasn't easy.
           | 
           | On the flip side, we were able to onboard people with their
           | services in days, not weeks (previously the company ran their
           | own datacentres). Teams were allowed to go to AWS directly,
           | or go to our K8s cluster. I was able to observe the lead time
           | of 3 teams, 2 chose k8s, 1 chose AWS. Those going to K8s were
           | able to get their prod environment running within a week. The
           | other team took a month to do their dev environment. All
           | three teams deployed a single stateless service.
           | 
           | This is obviously anecdotal, but I was really impressed with
           | the user friendliness of kubernetes for the consumers.
           | 
           | Nowadays, 4 years later at my current company, it's a
           | different story with every major provider managing the
           | clusters for you. At my current company we haven't taken the
           | jump yet, so unfortunately I can't fully compare, but the
           | little I've played with EKS, it's as easy as simple crud
           | operations.
        
             | sleepybrett wrote:
             | I'll back up your anecdote. We had a lot of teams fretting
             | about how long it would take to utilize kubernetes. After a
             | short sit down with one of the kubernetes ops team members
             | (even juniors) they were up in running and thanking us for
             | all the time they would save managing ec2 patching etc.
        
           | throwawayboise wrote:
           | My only experience with k8s is trying to run it in-house on a
           | cluster of servers. I could never get it to work. Ansible
           | makes _much_ more sense to me.
        
             | clipradiowallet wrote:
             | How do k8s and Ansible overlap in your world? I personally
             | haven't encountered a situation where one can serve as a
             | substitute for the other.
        
           | kinghajj wrote:
           | "Any sufficiently complicated deployment and application
           | management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified,
           | bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Kubernetes."
        
             | cat199 wrote:
             | ... including kubernetes itself
        
       | mplewis wrote:
       | I mean, what did anyone think the cloud was? This isn't news.
        
       | cyberge99 wrote:
       | Why does the graph have a legend when the only color is green?
        
       | alongub wrote:
       | I wrote a tool that helps estimate K8s costs by simulating K8s
       | clusters. You write your pods in a simple DSL and it runs kube-
       | scheduler without actual nodes behind the scenes.
       | 
       | It's still _really_ basic but I 'd love to hear your feedback!
       | 
       | https://github.com/aporia-ai/kubesurvival
        
         | frompdx wrote:
         | I think this is a great idea. I can see the DSL being very
         | useful for situations where you want to think about
         | hypotheticals. My main piece of feedback is that you should
         | consider supporting the ability to feed in your existing k8s
         | manifests as input to this tool instead in addition to the DSL.
         | I think that would make this tool very appealing and very easy
         | to onboard users with existing clusters who are looking to
         | reduce their costs.
        
       | Sparkyte wrote:
       | This article is written from the perspective of companies that
       | failed to plan for kubernetes and just used it willie nillie.
       | So... pointless.
        
       | avereveard wrote:
       | Kubernetes will happily run without autoscaling. This article is
       | barking at the wrong tree.
        
         | jrockway wrote:
         | I am pretty sure that Kubernetes is just a buzzword they
         | included to get clicks. You can definitely spend money in the
         | cloud using Kubernetes or not using Kubernetes, and in the
         | Kubernetes case, disabling node autoscaling doesn't eliminate
         | the ability to spend money by submitting an API object. The
         | article mentions PVs (which will be auto-provisioned whenever
         | you request one; this feature is so core to Kubernetes that it
         | works without effort even if you aren't using the cloud
         | provider's managed Kubernetes offering) and cloud storage
         | (write a byte, now you're spending money to store that byte),
         | and it's right -- those things cost money and make spend
         | unpredictable. But, it really has nothing to do with
         | Kubernetes. They may have well as said "using Intel CPUs makes
         | cloud spend unpredictable", because Intel CPUs are capable of
         | executing instructions that call APIs to spend money in the
         | cloud. Technically true, but kind of grasping at straws.
        
       | deknos wrote:
       | i've seen enough installations that this is not the fault of
       | kubernetes, but that they think this should work automatically.
       | this has to be implemented to count as well.
        
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