The whole kubernetes section of this writeup is two sentences. They went with a vendor provided kube & it was expensive & didn't go great.
It just sounds like it was poorly executed, mostly? There's enough blogs & YouTube of folk setting up HA k8s on a couple rpi, & even the 2GB model works fine if having not-quite-half the ram as overhead on apiservers/etcd nodes.
It's not like 37signals has hundreds of teams & thousands of services to juggle, so it' s not like they need a beefy control plane. I dont know what went wrong & there's no real info to guess by, but 37s seems like a semi-ideal easy lock for k8s on prem.
It seems like a lot of effort to do less. Hopefully it helps others too I guess. But it feels like a problem space with a lot lot of inherent complexity, that's liable to expand over time, & there is a very high skepticism I'd have to folks who opt to greenfield it all.
Sure, there is some inherent complexity, but by writing their own tool, they get to choose exactly how to handle the complexity for their particular use case, instead of having it dictated by a general-purpose tool developed by a consortium of US corporations. I consider that a win.
If they have the manpower and expertise to do that, more power to them!
Wow, uh, this is just such a sad short statement. It's just so woefully out of touch, so baselessly derogatory.
Kube is mostly a pretty generic idea, that greatly empowers folks to write their own stuff. There are dozens of gitops systems. There are hundreds of event-based systems. They almost all have some Custom Resources registered in API Server, but that's because it's good & doesn't encumber anyone. Beyond that it feels like the sky is the limit.
There are some deeper kube things. There's a Scheduler Framework that has a huge framework on extensibility, on modular plugins, to create huge flexibility to make this general.
This zeal, this desire to feel oppressed, this righteousness of rebellion: I wish it also could reflect & understand options & cooperation & possibility, see how a lot of the terrifying forces out there don't want us all consigned to narrow fixed paths. More people than you a knowledge want to potentiate & enrich. The goal of these efforts is anything but to dictate to us how we do things, and it's so easy, so simple to see that, to explore how flexible & varied & different t these world class cluster operating systems we're working on together are and how they hp us accomplish many different ends, how they help us explore new potetential ends.
On one hand, yes, in theory k8s is pretty extensible. In practice, though, you always end up being forced to do things you do not want or need to do, or being prevented from doing things you want to do, because of vendor specifics. Sometimes that is an acceptable tradeoff, sometimes not.
Plus, it is always good to take a step back and appreciate that monoculture is a bad thing in computing. We always need more different approaches, viewpoints, solutions to the same problems. Should everyone roll their own? Of course not - that's why I mentioned having sufficient manpower and expertise to do that.
We should be applauding having more choices and cheering, not scolding those who strive to provide them.
As for your last paragraph, I completely agree, we need to share the knowledge and cooperate. But expecting corporations to "potentiate & enrich" us is rather naive. They will play nice only as long as they need to, and the minute their financial incentives do not align with sharing, they will do their best to pull the rug from underneath everybody else. Even their sharing phase is only to build levers to use in the future. We've seen it over and over and over for the past several decades, with Oracle, SCO, Microsoft, Apple, Google, ... heck, I could pretty much list all big companies.
A lightweight k8s stack out of the box + argocd + cert manager is like I fra steroids.