<story><title>Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation</title><url>https://www.jeremybrown.tech/8-kubernetes-is-a-red-flag-signalling-premature-optimisation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>movedx</author><text>I agree entirely.&lt;p&gt;I like to call what the author is referring to as, &amp;quot;What-If Engineering&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s the science of thinking you&amp;#x27;ll be Google next week, so you build for that level of scale today. It involves picking extremely complicated, expensive (both in compute and skilled labour) technologies to deploy a Rails app that has two features. And it all boils down to, &amp;quot;But what if...&amp;quot; pre-optimising.&lt;p&gt;It happens at all levels.&lt;p&gt;At the individual unit level: &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll make these four lines of code a function in case I need to call it more than once later on - you know, what if that&amp;#x27;s needed?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It also happens at the database level: &amp;quot;What if we need to change the schema later on? Do we really want to be restricted to a hard schema in MySQL? Let&amp;#x27;s use MongoDB&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s even worse, is Helm and the likes make it possible to spin up these kinds of solutions in a heart beat. And, as witnessed and evidenced by several comments below, developers think that&amp;#x27;s that... all done. It&amp;#x27;s a perfect solution. It won&amp;#x27;t fail because K8s will manage it. Oh boy.&lt;p&gt;Start with a monolith on two VMs and a load balancer. Chips and networks are cheaper than labour, and right now, anyone with K8s experience is demanding $150k + 10% Superannuation here in Australia... minimum!&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;martinfowler.com&amp;#x2F;bliki&amp;#x2F;MonolithFirst.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;martinfowler.com&amp;#x2F;bliki&amp;#x2F;MonolithFirst.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danielvaughn</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve told this story before on HN, but a recent client of mine was on Kubernetes. He had hired an engineer like 5 years ago to build out his backend, and the guy set up about &lt;i&gt;60&lt;/i&gt; different services to run a 2-3 page note taking web app. Absolute madness.&lt;p&gt;I couldn&amp;#x27;t help but rewrite the entire thing, and now it&amp;#x27;s a single 8K SLOC server in App Engine, down from about 70K SLOC.</text></comment>
<story><title>Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation</title><url>https://www.jeremybrown.tech/8-kubernetes-is-a-red-flag-signalling-premature-optimisation/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>movedx</author><text>I agree entirely.&lt;p&gt;I like to call what the author is referring to as, &amp;quot;What-If Engineering&amp;quot;. It&amp;#x27;s the science of thinking you&amp;#x27;ll be Google next week, so you build for that level of scale today. It involves picking extremely complicated, expensive (both in compute and skilled labour) technologies to deploy a Rails app that has two features. And it all boils down to, &amp;quot;But what if...&amp;quot; pre-optimising.&lt;p&gt;It happens at all levels.&lt;p&gt;At the individual unit level: &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll make these four lines of code a function in case I need to call it more than once later on - you know, what if that&amp;#x27;s needed?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It also happens at the database level: &amp;quot;What if we need to change the schema later on? Do we really want to be restricted to a hard schema in MySQL? Let&amp;#x27;s use MongoDB&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s even worse, is Helm and the likes make it possible to spin up these kinds of solutions in a heart beat. And, as witnessed and evidenced by several comments below, developers think that&amp;#x27;s that... all done. It&amp;#x27;s a perfect solution. It won&amp;#x27;t fail because K8s will manage it. Oh boy.&lt;p&gt;Start with a monolith on two VMs and a load balancer. Chips and networks are cheaper than labour, and right now, anyone with K8s experience is demanding $150k + 10% Superannuation here in Australia... minimum!&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;martinfowler.com&amp;#x2F;bliki&amp;#x2F;MonolithFirst.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;martinfowler.com&amp;#x2F;bliki&amp;#x2F;MonolithFirst.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>osigurdson</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Helm and the likes make it possible to spin up these kinds of solutions in a heart beat&lt;p&gt;Genuine question, why is this bad? Is it because k8s can spin it up but becomes unreliable later? I think the industry wants something like k8s - define a deployment in a file and have that work across cloud providers and even on premise. Why can&amp;#x27;t we have that? It&amp;#x27;s just machines on a network after all. Maybe k8s itself is just buggy and unreliable but I&amp;#x27;m hopeful that something like it becomes ubiquitous eventually.</text></comment>