Don't Use Kubernetes, Yet

1

Rancher

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.

#DevOps Tools #Developer Tools #Continuous Integration And Delivery 24 social mentions

2

k3s

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.

#DevOps Tools #Developer Tools #Containers As A Service 159 social mentions

3

Kontena Lens

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).

#Development #Tool #Cloud Computing 40 social mentions