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• Kubernetes is a "kumbaya DevOps model" where everyone needs to know everything, with blurred lines between operator and application developer responsibilities |
• YAML is a common format for modeling complex software in Kubernetes |
• Kubernetes can be too complex for small teams or startups |
• The speaker suggests that fully managed platforms like Heroku or Fly.io are often a better choice than Kubernetes |
• The litmus test is to "stay on fully managed platforms as long as you can" |
• Docker played a crucial role in Kubernetes' success by standardizing the concept of containers |
• Kubernetes would not have gained traction without Docker's influence and the subsequent hype surrounding it |
• Relationship between Docker and Kubernetes, and whether knowledge of Docker is necessary for understanding Kubernetes |
• Centralizing knowledge of crafting efficient Docker files as a team effort, rather than individual application developers learning it |
• Importance of understanding Linux networking concepts when getting started with Kubernetes |
• Using managed Kubernetes services (e.g. EKS, AKS, GKE) to simplify adoption and reduce complexity |
• Avoiding unnecessary tooling and focusing on core functionality in order to minimize maintenance and upgrade issues |
• The complexity and challenges of using Kubernetes for automation |
• Importance of investing in education and training for engineers to understand the complexity of Kubernetes |
• Need for internal platforms or tools to manage and automate resources within the cluster |
• Role of automation in unlocking the value proposition of Kubernetes |
• Benefits of hiring experts or finding partners with subject matter expertise in Kubernetes |
• Discussion of the importance of debugging and understanding what is happening in the runtime environment, including the use of various tools such as Grafana Cloud, Honeycomb, and eBPF |
• The concept of "Heroku-like" interfaces for developers to interact with Kubernetes without needing to understand its intricacies. |
• Importance of observability and metrics in containerized environments |
• Benefits and challenges of using Kubernetes, including cluster size and complexity |
• Best practices for running stateless workloads in Kubernetes (many small clusters or homogenous workloads) |
• Limitations and considerations for running stateful workloads in Kubernetes (smaller clusters, RDS) |
• Running PostgreSQL as a stateful set in Kubernetes |
• Avoiding managed services like RDS or CockroachDB for simplicity |
• Single instance of Postgres without replication for low downtime |
• Hourly full backups with restore within 2-3 minutes |
• Trade-off between potential data loss and operational ease |
• Managing large numbers of databases as stateful sets in Kubernetes can be problematic |
• Never shipping products can make a startup faster |
• Launching early increases complexity and slows down operations |
• Delay Kubernetes adoption unless necessary, use managed platforms instead |
• Using Kubernetes requires significant automation and education efforts |
• Focusing on simplicity when using Kubernetes is essential to manage "innovation debt" |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It's been several years since we worked together - 2016, 2017 - and I think it's been too long since you and me played the game of table tennis. How's your game? \[laughter\] |
**Tammer Saleh:** I was so bad at table tennis. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's not true. That's not true. I've seen improvement. I've seen those years in which you really improved. And the last games that we've had were really good. So I enjoyed them. |
**Tammer Saleh:** It was a lot of fun. I don't know if you know this, it was never official, but it always kind of seemed like your seniority at Pivotal would directly correlate with how good you were at table tennis. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. I knew that, but I never mentioned it to anyone. I think it was like a little thing, yes. |
**Tammer Saleh:** I'm pretty sure most of my engineers let me win, just to make me feel better. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm sorry, not me; no, we had some great games. So did you play much in the last three, four years? |
**Tammer Saleh:** Not at all. I mean, it was entirely a Pivotal thing. It was built into the Pivotal culture. You're pair programming and you need a quick 15-minute break, where you get up and you jump around, and there's table tennis tables right there, and you're playing doubles, so you're a pair, you find another pa... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[04:21\] Yeah. I really miss that. From the whole office culture, which seems to be slowly disappearing when it comes to remote work, and this is like the new norm, and we're in it for the long drive, shall I say... I really miss that table tennis, that social aspect. I mean, pairing is great. You ca... |
**Tammer Saleh:** It's true. I mean, I've always been very passionately 100% remote. Our company has always been 100% remote, even before the apocalypse. And that made the apocalypse a little bit easier for us to weather as a company. But I do miss that camaraderie of going out to lunch together, that camaraderie of pl... |
And even more important - and I think this is more about American culture and what's been happening to American culture over the past, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 years... As people congregate more into the cities, we are getting a very strong cultural divide. It's probably happening in other places too, but for us, it's ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. I can see that. And I do have to say, having left a big city not that long ago -- I mean, I'm still around it. I'm still around London, but I'm not living in London anymore. And I do appreciate the advantages to that; but I can also see some of the trade-offs. So there's always some trade-offs. |
**Tammer Saleh:** We miss the really good dinners. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. And the table tennis. |
**Tammer Saleh:** And the table tennis, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Now, one other topic that I know that you're really passionate about besides dinners and table tennis is Kubernetes. |
**Tammer Saleh:** It's true. It's true. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Same here. Same here. Big fans. So I know that you're seeing so many things around Kubernetes - so many social interactions, so many teams interacting with Kubernetes. And I see companies these days, they no longer say, "Oh, Kubernetes is interesting. Maybe I should try it out." They need Kubernetes. ... |
**Tammer Saleh:** Yeah, that's a great question. And just to put a little bit of context in it - so at SuperOrbital, we have two lines of business. One of the lines of business - the biggest one - is our engineering services. We help companies out with very difficult Kubernetes-related problems. We have a very small te... |
\[08:16\] We also have a smaller part of our business, which is producing workshops and training. And the reason that I bring this up is because when we are doing our workshops, that's when we engage more with companies who are just starting to embrace Kubernetes, right? So we don't help those customers on the engineer... |
That's the key problem with Kubernetes... I mean, everybody who's used it, knows it, but the complexity is huge. I mean, there's something like 80 different resource types that the Kubernetes API understands, the last time I looked. And each one of those can have dozens or hundreds of attributes that you have to, to so... |
The interesting thing to me is that the original authors of Kubernetes, they never envisioned that Kubernetes would be used directly by application developers. That's fascinating to me, right? There's some tweet by Joe Beda where he said that they always viewed YAML as an implementation detail, as like the assembly lan... |
So absolutely, when we train our customers in Kubernetes, our most popular workshop is this core Kubernetes workshop, where it's like you just want to get your application developers up to speed on how to use Kubernetes. The complexity is just astounding, and you need all of your engineers to understand it if they're g... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So when companies come to you saying that, "Hey, Tammer (and your awesome SuperOrbital team) we need help. We really need help", what do they need help with? Is it training? Is it running stuff? What does that look like? |
**Tammer Saleh:** Because of the nature of who we hire and how we're positioned, we don't help with maintenance on clusters. We don't help with on-call or upgrading clusters and that kind of stuff. It just doesn't make sense to engage with us for that kind of thing. But customers definitely come to us for training, and... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Can you give us a few examples, like some hard Kubernetes problems that companies struggle with, or teams struggle with? |
**Tammer Saleh:** \[11:48\] Yeah. We have a couple of clients who are attacking on-premise installations for their product. They have a product that they run, but they want to deliver it to other companies, on-premise, in the other companies, AWS accounts, or even bare metal, or whatever. And the interesting thing abou... |
And so what our clients need is not only to believe that what they are going to be deploying into their customers' Kubernetes environments are well-engineered and using all of the best practices from Kubernetes' point of view, but often, they also need a lot of custom code developed in order to do health checks. For on... |
When we were at Cloud Foundry, we have so much experience with the headaches of trying to ship on-premise that we just naturally -- that's why we ended up with all these customers doing it, because we just had that experience already. |
Another fun example is we had a crypto client who wanted to integrate AWS Nitro secure Enclaves with EKS. And the Nitro Enclave thing is a really interesting technology where you can run verified code in a highly secure hardware-based environment that has to be built into the chips on the actual machines that AWS gives... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right. You've hit on so many things, and I'm getting to ask one thing, which is very close to my heart. So in Cloud Foundry, we knew to use BOSH to manage Cloud Foundry. Is there such a thing in Kubernetes where when you deploy Kubernetes on bare metal, what would you say? What should users or teams u... |
**Tammer Saleh:** There's a variety of tools for deploying Kubernetes to bare metal installations. And that's not really the hard part with Kubernetes. In the cloud, there's managed Kubernetes, and that solves all your problems. That's not the problem with Kubernetes in complexity. In fact, getting a Kubernetes cluster... |
\[15:56\] It's interesting that you brought up BOSH and Cloud Foundry. For those who don't know, the way that Cloud Foundry was designed was that we had two different products. We had BOSH, which was sort of a competitor to Terraform and Ansible and Salt. I don't know this for sure, but I think it came right out of the... |
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