VSHN.timer #102: To Kubernetes or not to Kubernetes, that’s the Question

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to answer the question every DevOps team is asking themselves in 2021: „should we use Kubernetes or not?“

1. Let’s start with the positive answer. The Stack Overflow blog argues that you should consider it if you’re starting a new project these days. They share their own experiences of migrating their massively popular application (written in C#) to containers, and then to Kubernetes. A massive undertaking and an excellent case study.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/07/21/why-you-should-build-on-kubernetes-from-day-one/

2. But of course, there are also lots of teams that are perfectly happy, productive, and 100% DevOps-y without Kubernetes. Take for example the Ably messaging platform team. They built and manage their own infrastructure on AWS, and they are extremely happy with it. They are able to scale at will, they use infrastructure as code, and have no plans to move to Kubernetes anytime soon.

https://ably.com/blog/no-we-dont-use-kubernetes

3. A common strategy to reduce the risks related to Kubernetes consists in hiring us 🙂 or maybe just using a fully managed platform, for example one with a level of service comparable to that of Amazon EKS. It is true that the EKS ecosystem is simply awesome! Check this ever-growing list of tools to use, social media accounts to follow, and resources to learn from.

https://realvz.github.io/awesome-eks/

4. Speaking about managed Kubernetes services, we’re very glad to learn from our friends at Exoscale that their new Scalable Kubernetes Service (SKS) has been officially certified by the CNCF! We use Exoscale a lot in VSHN, in particular for OpenShift 4 clusters, which is one of our products.

https://www.exoscale.com/syslog/sks-continuous-development-of-our-kubernetes-service/

5. If you choose to use Kubernetes, one of the best things in the ecosystem is, without any doubt, K3s; a lightweight, fast, compliant Kubernetes distribution made by our friends at Rancher, ready for Edge and IoT deployments. And it’s also a great alternative to Minikube for local development. And now, somebody even figured out how to use it inside a GitHub action, which means you can now kubectl apply in your CI/CD workflows.

https://github.com/debianmaster/actions-k3s

Do you use Kubernetes? How do you use it? In production, for testing, or during development? Do you have any tips and tricks for teams new to Kubernetes? Get in touch with us, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

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PS²: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about Kubernetes: #4, #8, #11, #14, #16, #19, #23, #37, #46, #49, #59, #64, #74, #82, #97, and #99.