<story><title>Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks</title><url>https://carlosrdrz.es/kubernetes-for-small-projects/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>solatic</author><text>Oh man, the original article went way over the author&amp;#x27;s head. The point of the original article was that even though Kubernetes is &lt;i&gt;primarily&lt;/i&gt; useful for tackling the challenges involved with running many workloads at enterprise scale, it &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; also be used to run small hobbyist workloads at a price point acceptable for hobbyist projects.&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that Kubernetes should now be used for &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; hobbyist projects? No. If I&amp;#x27;m thinking of playing around with a Raspberry Pi or other SBC, do I need to install Kubernetes on the SBC first? If I&amp;#x27;m thinking of playing around with IoT or serverless, should I dump AWS- or GCE-proprietary tools because nobody will ever run anything that that can&amp;#x27;t run on Kubernetes ever again? If I&amp;#x27;m going to play around with React or React Native, should I write up a backend just so I can have something that I can run in a Kubernetes cluster, because all hobbyist projects must run Kubernetes now, because it&amp;#x27;s cheap enough for hobbyist projects? If I&amp;#x27;m going to play around with machine learning at home, buy a machine with a heavy GPU, figure out how to get Kubernetes to schedule my machine learning workload correctly instead of just running it directly on that machine, because uhhh maybe someday I&amp;#x27;ll have three such machines with powerful GPUs plus other home servers for all my other hobbyist projects?&lt;p&gt;No, no, no, no, no. Clearly.&lt;p&gt;But maybe I envision my side project turning into full-time startup some day. Maybe I see all the news about Kubernetes and think it would be cool to be more familiar with it. Nah, probably too expensive. Oh wait, I can get something running for $5? Hey, that&amp;#x27;s pretty neat!&lt;p&gt;Different people will use different solutions for different project requirements.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>admax88q</author><text>&amp;gt; But maybe I envision my side project turning into full-time startup some day.&lt;p&gt;The state of the art for cluster management will probably something completely different by then.  Better to build a good product now and if you really want to turn it into a startup, productionize it then.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Maybe I see all the news about Kubernetes and think it would be cool to be more familiar with it.&lt;p&gt;If learning Kubernetes _is_ your side project, then perfect go do that.  Otherwise its just a distraction, taking more time away from actually building your side project and putting it into building infrastructure around your side project.&lt;p&gt;If what you really wanted to build is infrastructure, then great, you&amp;#x27;re doing swell, but if you were really trying to build some other fun side app, Kubernetes is just a time&amp;#x2F;money sink in almost all cases IMO.</text></comment>
<story><title>Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks</title><url>https://carlosrdrz.es/kubernetes-for-small-projects/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>solatic</author><text>Oh man, the original article went way over the author&amp;#x27;s head. The point of the original article was that even though Kubernetes is &lt;i&gt;primarily&lt;/i&gt; useful for tackling the challenges involved with running many workloads at enterprise scale, it &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; also be used to run small hobbyist workloads at a price point acceptable for hobbyist projects.&lt;p&gt;Does that mean that Kubernetes should now be used for &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; hobbyist projects? No. If I&amp;#x27;m thinking of playing around with a Raspberry Pi or other SBC, do I need to install Kubernetes on the SBC first? If I&amp;#x27;m thinking of playing around with IoT or serverless, should I dump AWS- or GCE-proprietary tools because nobody will ever run anything that that can&amp;#x27;t run on Kubernetes ever again? If I&amp;#x27;m going to play around with React or React Native, should I write up a backend just so I can have something that I can run in a Kubernetes cluster, because all hobbyist projects must run Kubernetes now, because it&amp;#x27;s cheap enough for hobbyist projects? If I&amp;#x27;m going to play around with machine learning at home, buy a machine with a heavy GPU, figure out how to get Kubernetes to schedule my machine learning workload correctly instead of just running it directly on that machine, because uhhh maybe someday I&amp;#x27;ll have three such machines with powerful GPUs plus other home servers for all my other hobbyist projects?&lt;p&gt;No, no, no, no, no. Clearly.&lt;p&gt;But maybe I envision my side project turning into full-time startup some day. Maybe I see all the news about Kubernetes and think it would be cool to be more familiar with it. Nah, probably too expensive. Oh wait, I can get something running for $5? Hey, that&amp;#x27;s pretty neat!&lt;p&gt;Different people will use different solutions for different project requirements.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>Personally, as somebody who is building a small Kubernetes cluster right now at home just for the fun of it: I think using Kubernetes for small projects is mostly a bad idea. So I appreciate the author warning people so they don&amp;#x27;t get misled by all the (justified) buzz around it.&lt;p&gt;For your average developer who just wants to get something running on a port, Kubernetes introduces two barriers: containerization and Kubernetes itself. These are non-trivial things to learn, especially if you don&amp;#x27;t have an ops background, and both of them add substantial debugging overhead. And again for that developer, they provide very, very small gains.&lt;p&gt;I think the calculus changes if that developer starts to run multiple services on multiple servers, wants to keep doing that for years, and needs high uptime. I have a bunch of personal services I run in VMs with Chef, and I&amp;#x27;m excited to convert that over to Kubernetes, as it will make future OS upgrades and other maintenance easier. But my old setup ran for something like 6 years and it was just fine. For hobbyists whose hobbies don&amp;#x27;t include playing with cluster-scale ops tooling, I think it&amp;#x27;s perfectly fine to ignore Kubernetes. It&amp;#x27;s the new hotness, but it doesn&amp;#x27;t provide much value for them yet. They can wait a few years; by then the tooling will surely have improved for low-end installs.</text></comment>