Kubernetes Failure Stories
After a couple of years of massive frustration with the entire direction of the &quot;devops&quot; segment, I think I&#x27;m resolved to get out of it and either move further up back to ordinary application development or further down into the actual kernel, preferably working on FreeBSD or some other OS that&#x27;s more sane and focused than Linux.<p>Kubernetes represents the complete &quot;operationalization&quot; of the devops space. As companies have built out &quot;devops&quot; teams, they&#x27;ve mostly re-used their existing ops people, plus some stragglers from the dev side. These are the people you hear talking about how great Kubernetes is, because for them, they see it as &quot;run a Helm chart and all done!&quot;. Which makes sense, since they were, not too long ago, the same guys fired up about all the super-neato buttons to click in the Control Panel. 90% of &quot;devops&quot; people at non-FAANG companies are operations people who just think of it as a new name for their old job.<p>Among this set, there&#x27;s no recognition of the massive needless complexity that permeates all the way through Kubernetes, no recognition of the tried-and-tested toolkit thrown away and left behind, no recognition of the fact that we&#x27;re working <i>so hard</i> to get things that we&#x27;ve had as built-in pieces of any decent server OS for decades. No recognition that Kubernetes <i>exists</i> so it can serve as Google&#x27;s wedge in the Rent-Your-Server-From-Me Wars, and no awareness that just in general, <i>there&#x27;s no reason it should be this hard</i>.<p>Of course, to them, it&#x27;s not hard. They have an interface with buttons, they can run `helm install`, they get pretty graphs via their &quot;service mesh&quot;. That&#x27;s what I mean by &quot;operationalized&quot;; Kuberenetes is meant to be <i>consumed</i>, not configured. You don&#x27;t ask how or why. You run the Minikube VM image locally and you rent GKE or EKS and go on your merry way. The intricacies are for the geniuses who&#x27;ve blursed us with this death trap to worry about! Worst-case, you use something like kops. Start asking questions or putting pieces together beyond this, and you&#x27;re starting to sound like you don&#x27;t have very much of that much-coveted &quot;devops mindset&quot; anymore.<p>&quot;What happens if there&#x27;s a security issue?&quot; Oh, silly, security issues are a thing of the past in the day and age where we blindly `FROM crazy-joes-used-mongodb-emporium:latest-built-2-years-ago`. Containers don&#x27;t <i>need</i> updates, you goose. They&#x27;re beautiful, blubber-powered magic, and the Great Googly Kubernetes in the sky is managing &quot;all that&quot; for us. Right on.<p>I&#x27;m picking on Kubernetes specifically here because it&#x27;s the epitome of all this, but really everything in &quot;devops&quot; world has become this way, and combined with the head-over-heels &quot;omg get us into the cloud right now&quot; mentality that&#x27;s overtaking virtually every company, it&#x27;s a bad scene.<p>Systems have gotten so much more convoluted and so much dumber over the last 5 years. The industry has a lot to be embarrassed about right now.