Gitpod and Importance of Understanding Kubernetes Workloads

In a provocative and detailed post, GitPod team posted about why they were leaving Kubernetes. It’s a deeply reflective post journaling the experiments and learnings that could greatly benefit the community and demonstrates the complex decision making.

We felt that we need to frame the discussion to help the community understand better what happened and how it is applicable to them.

It is our assessment that there was a mismatch between assumptions and structure of K8s and what the workload required. Cloud Development Environments like GitPod and Github codespaces are like VSCode sessions on the browser. They are highly sticky sessions compute and data with very less tolerance for data loss. This is hard to do at scale in general. Kubernetes as an approach to deal with deployment complexity ran into two issues:

The analogy of cattle shelter, pet shelter, and pet daycare on subscription service is quite fitting and can help illustrate the nature and needs of each workload category:

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