The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes
trigger warning: bitter jaded ops person working in a real company<p><i>&quot;[...] users are expected to stay “reasonably up-to-date with versions of Kubernetes they use in production.” [...] the upstream Kubernetes community only aims to support up to three “minor” Kubernetes version at a time. [...] if you deployed a Kubernetes 1.6 soon after it came out last March, you were expected to upgrade to 1.7 within roughly nine months or by the time 1.9 shipped in mid-December.&quot;</i><p>Jesus christ this is so annoying.<p>Businesses don&#x27;t have a couple hundred billion dollars sitting around to spend on engineers to look at release notes, compare changes, write new features, write new test cases, fix bugs, and push to prod, <i>every 3 months</i>, just to <i>keep existing functionality</i> for orchestrating their containers.<p>We have LTS because businesses (and individuals) don&#x27;t want to have to do the above. They just want a reliable tool. They want the ability to say that if a bug is found in 3 years, it will be fixed, and they can just keep using the tool.<p>We don&#x27;t give a crap about &quot;Kubernetes’ domination of the distributed infrastructure world&quot;. We don&#x27;t want to use Kubernetes. We just want an orchestration tool - commodified tooling. We want to stop caring about what we&#x27;re running. We just want the fucking thing to work, and to not have to jump through hoops for it to work.<p><i>&quot;Moving Kubernetes Workloads to New Clusters instead of Upgrading&quot;</i><p>UGH. We only do this for bastardized unholy stupid shit like OpenStack. Not only is this not fun, it takes forever (you try moving 50 different clients off the service they&#x27;ve been using for three years), and you have to have duplicate resources. What the fuck is the point of cloud computing and containers and all this bullshit if I have to have double the infrastructure and juggle how it&#x27;s all used just to upgrade some fucking software?!??!?!<p><i>&quot;The Kubernetes-as-a-Service offerings, particularly Google Cloud’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE), are the well-polished bellwethers of what is currently the most stable and production-worthy version of Kubernetes.&quot;</i><p>Oh. We&#x27;re supposed to pay Google to run it for us.<p>....I&#x27;m just going to use AWS.