Have you ever tried to set up HA environments before Kubernetes and friends, let alone anything that can do failover and some form of auto-scaling? Kubernetes might have some unwarranted complexity, but let's not pretend it was a walk in the park setting environments up with ad-hoc shell scripts, HA proxy, IP failover, manual package updates and more fun stuff. Tools like Kubernetes and their general abstractions are vastly better than anything I could come up with in a time before even Puppet and Ansible existed. You have to take into consideration all that orchestrators like Kubernetes are trying to replace before you can meaningfully criticise their complexity.
Sadly enough it's all YAML, but at least it's all YAML and not random mostly undocumented arcane configuration formats...
Have you ever tried to set up HA environments before Kubernetes and friends, let alone anything that can do failover and some form of auto-scaling?
Those were simpler days for sure.
1) Set up multiple fileservers w/ DRDB or some sort of clustered filesystem like glusterfs
2) Set up multiple database servers in a cluster
3) Set up multiple web servers, all of which can connect to the NAS and DB
4) Optionally set up a cache layer like Varnish
5) Set up a hardware load balancer (or even varnish/nginx/haproxy)
Autoscaling on bare metal wasn't really a thing for most DCs, but setting up HA environments has been possible for a long time. Things were actually a lot less complicated because there weren't as many options imo. You'd generally overprovision to handle your peak loads, or maybe buy a few more servers before busy seasons/days and cancel them later.
Managing a bare metal kubernetes installation feels like it has a lot more moving pieces and ways that it can break. Cloud providers and managed services do take away a lot of the burden though.
My first job was managing bare metal for a variety of companies including fairly large multinational labs, all the way down to plugging in the RAM and fiddling with the routers, mostly for VoIP systems but also data backups. I didn't architect any HA environments but worked on some.
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Have you ever tried to set up HA environments before Kubernetes and friends, let alone anything that can do failover and some form of auto-scaling? Kubernetes might have some unwarranted complexity, but let's not pretend it was a walk in the park setting environments up with ad-hoc shell scripts, HA proxy, IP failover, manual package updates and more fun stuff. Tools like Kubernetes and their general abstractions are vastly better than anything I could come up with in a time before even Puppet and Ansible existed. You have to take into consideration all that orchestrators like Kubernetes are trying to replace before you can meaningfully criticise their complexity.
Sadly enough it's all YAML, but at least it's all YAML and not random mostly undocumented arcane configuration formats...
Those were simpler days for sure.
1) Set up multiple fileservers w/ DRDB or some sort of clustered filesystem like glusterfs 2) Set up multiple database servers in a cluster 3) Set up multiple web servers, all of which can connect to the NAS and DB 4) Optionally set up a cache layer like Varnish 5) Set up a hardware load balancer (or even varnish/nginx/haproxy)
Autoscaling on bare metal wasn't really a thing for most DCs, but setting up HA environments has been possible for a long time. Things were actually a lot less complicated because there weren't as many options imo. You'd generally overprovision to handle your peak loads, or maybe buy a few more servers before busy seasons/days and cancel them later.
Managing a bare metal kubernetes installation feels like it has a lot more moving pieces and ways that it can break. Cloud providers and managed services do take away a lot of the burden though.
My first job was managing bare metal for a variety of companies including fairly large multinational labs, all the way down to plugging in the RAM and fiddling with the routers, mostly for VoIP systems but also data backups. I didn't architect any HA environments but worked on some.