This goes against the HN trope that "you don't need Kubernetes unless you are Google-size".
It turns out Kubernetes is actually perfect for small teams as it solves many hard operational issues, allowing you to focus on the important part of the stack: the application.
The key is to stick to a simple setup (try not to mess with networking config) and use a managed offering such as GKE. We may need a Kubernetes, The Good Parts guide.
> It turns out Kubernetes is actually perfect for small teams
As long as at least one of them is an expert on kubernetes. In this case, the one person in the team is that person, and as he points out in the article, he's using it because it's what he knows.
That should be the takeaway, I think. The "trope" remains pretty sensible IMO; I've seen it first-hand, jumping on kubernetes without the know-how is a foot-gun factory, and that team ultimately gave up on trying to implement it.
I use DigitalOcean's managed kubernetes for one of my side projects that I did with a friend. Really happy with it. And it's actually cost-neutral: all you do is pay for the $10 droplet it runs on and you get the managed k8s at no additional cost.
I've done a complete 180 on this too, I realised I was reacting from my default position of hostility to new concepts rather than an honest appraisal. I am writing it up at the moment but I've been working on a 1 person SAAS MVP tutorial [0] and though I've definitely misconfigured something having the ability to go from git push to deployed to production with 0 downtime inside of 5 minutes with no manual steps is such a nice flow, versus my previous attempts of SCP and faffing around with services.
> Kubernetes aims to provide all the features needed to run Docker-based applications including cluster management, scheduling, service discovery, monitoring, secrets management and more. Nomad only aims to focus on cluster management and scheduling and is designed with the Unix philosophy of having a small scope while composing with tools like [Hashicorp] Consul for service discovery/service mesh and [Hashicorp] Vault for secret management.
> Nomad is architecturally much simpler. Nomad is a single binary, both for clients and servers, and requires no external services for coordination or storage. Nomad combines a lightweight resource manager and a sophisticated scheduler into a single system. By default, Nomad is distributed, highly available, and operationally simple.
Like all of Hashicorp's tools, they are more complicated and error-prone than they first appear, because they stuff too much functionality in one binary. But it does let you implement one piece at a time, so you can make incremental improvements as you need them.
What do you think is "too much functionality in one binary"? With Nomad I feel like the opposite is true: Nomad is just a workload scheduler. If I need service discovery I can add Consul, if I need secrets management I can add vault. Honestly curious by what you meant exactly and how Kubernetes does it better / easier.
Kelsey Hightower's 'Kubernetes The Hard Way' [0] "is optimized for learning, which means taking the long route to ensure you understand each task required to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster."
It turns out Kubernetes is actually perfect for small teams as it solves many hard operational issues, allowing you to focus on the important part of the stack: the application.
The key is to stick to a simple setup (try not to mess with networking config) and use a managed offering such as GKE. We may need a Kubernetes, The Good Parts guide.