From 0 to Kubernetes – Random thoughts

At this point of my “mini-series” about Kubernetes I’ll give you an unsorted list of bullet points about various things that I’ve taken away from all the experimenting.

  • kubernetes is much more powerful than “local docker”, or a docker swarm – but also way more complicated to use.
  • the kubernetes dashboard is a very powerful tool, but not very user friendly. Sadly, there are no real (free/open) alternatives that I’ve found.
  • portainer is a decent alternative but why do they use completely different terms for some things?
  • k8dash seems to be nice but not that powerful – all you can do is apply yaml files. You can’t even delete existing objects directly from the UI.
  • non-http routers need additional IP addresses if you want to run several different deployments of the same non http-service – just like local docker (I haven’t actually tried that yet).
  • yaml is horrible. Seriously? Being anal about indentations? I thought we got away from that with getting away from COBOL. That being said: yamllint is your friend, and having the following snippet in your ~/.vimrc also helps:
    autocmd FileType yaml setlocal ai ts=2 sw=2 et cc=3,5,7,9,11
    what this does is to tell vim to use spaces for indentation, with two spaces per “tab press”, automatic indentation, and vertical colored lines every two characters for the first few columns, for any YAML file. Very useful for ansible, too.
  • on debian buster vim is pre-configured with syntax highlighting turned off. That is not a good idea when you have to deal with yaml… to fix that, put “syntax on” in either your ~/.vimrc or in /etc/vim/vimrc.local.

I think that is (almost) all about this (for now) except for one last thought: By now I can really see why using Red Hat OpenShift instead of “naked” K8s is a good idea in a corporate environment – all this extra work to add the kind of functionality that you need in a Dev Ops culture driven environment has already been done by Red Hat. Plus, support with guaranteed response times… I have a few forum posts on the traefik and the portainer forums that several weeks later no one has even read yet.

The final post of the series is here.

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