Having struggled with setting up kubernetes over the last month on my own, I’ve come to realize the absolute value of simplicity.
In the end Helm just introduced more problems than it solved. Rather than applying configs haphazardly and relying on 3rd party services, it was ultimately much simpler to just download the configs for whatever service was needed (nginx ingress controller for me) and committing them to source control.
My biggest take away from the k8s community is that lots of people write terrible documentation and other people write blog posts and SO answers without actually understanding how kubernetes works under the hood.
There is still an ocean of depth in regards to k8s I don’t know yet, but I feel a lot stronger about getting the intermediate basics. I’m at a point where I’m being productive again.
This is actually the advice I’m giving every new systems engineer that joins our organization.
Learning how Kubernetes works is much easier if you first get a firm grasp of the basics and then start bolting stuff on like istio knative and all the other cool stickers “modern architects” wet dream about.
The people writing posts and the people running production workloads seem to be a non overlapping ven diagram when it comes to a huge portion of kubernetes.
Istio solves lots of problems (pod-to-pod encryption, telemetry, etc).
It also enables lots of functionality when it comes to CD. It enables things like canary releases, testing, rollback etc etc in a simpler way by keeping it in the Kubernetes space (and not relying on slow external LBs).
You probably won't know why you need Istio till you need it.
In the end Helm just introduced more problems than it solved. Rather than applying configs haphazardly and relying on 3rd party services, it was ultimately much simpler to just download the configs for whatever service was needed (nginx ingress controller for me) and committing them to source control.
My biggest take away from the k8s community is that lots of people write terrible documentation and other people write blog posts and SO answers without actually understanding how kubernetes works under the hood.
There is still an ocean of depth in regards to k8s I don’t know yet, but I feel a lot stronger about getting the intermediate basics. I’m at a point where I’m being productive again.