A lot of comments here about the complexity. But a takeaway from the article is that driving a car is different from repairing it.
We are a startup, had zero knowledge of k8s before. Without GKE, we would have lost days and days of work to imitate parts of k8s on VMs.
Scaling up and down, everything as a container (even cron jobs. Otherwise we had to keep a vm running and use some scheduler).
GKE has been a massive advantage for us.
The complexity bits may be true for someone managing a k8s cluster. Even with just 3-4 services, managing everything as cattle has been amazing.
To be perfectly fair with you, GKE is another level from every other k8s installation target.
EKS and AKS are not nearly as well polished and put together, and god help you if you decide to run on-prem.
The problem is of course that you’re quite right that it’s like driving a car, but ultimately unless you have a good support contract with your car manufacturer for a specific use of the car, then you have to take it to another mechanic and they’re going to put you over a barrel.
Hosted k8s is a blessing for development teams. A great benefit is that integrating k8s into tools such as Github or Gitlab pipelines makes it a unified and easy deployment cycle. No more issues regarding different release procedures while someone is out of office.
I couldn’t agree more. This and the cloud foundation toolkit for terraform is why we chose GCP, and it got us up and running with an impressive infrastructure in a few days.
Is your goal really to be up and running in a few days? My goal is to run for years without significant ops effort. Maintainence cost always, always dwarves development cost.
We are a startup, had zero knowledge of k8s before. Without GKE, we would have lost days and days of work to imitate parts of k8s on VMs.
Scaling up and down, everything as a container (even cron jobs. Otherwise we had to keep a vm running and use some scheduler). GKE has been a massive advantage for us. The complexity bits may be true for someone managing a k8s cluster. Even with just 3-4 services, managing everything as cattle has been amazing.