Losing control to Kubernetes
Kubernetes is about giving up control. As someone who likes to understand what’s going on that’s made it hard for me to embrace it. I’ve also mostly been able to ignore it, which has helped. However I’m aware it’s incredibly popular, and there’s some infrastructure at work that uses it. While it’s not my responsibility I always find having an actual implementation of something is useful in understanding it generally, so I decided it was time to dig in and learn something new.
First up, I should say I understand the trade-off here about handing a bunch of decisions off to Kubernetes about the underlying platform allowing development/deployment to concentrate on a nice consistent environment. I get the analogy with the shipping container model where you can abstract out both sides knowing all you have to do is conform to the TEU API. In terms of the underlying concepts I’ve got some virtualisation and container experience, so I’m not coming at this as a complete newcomer. And I understand multi-site dynamically routed networks.
That said, let’s start with a basic goal. I’d like to understand k8s (see, I can be cool and use the short name) enough to be comfortable with what’s going on under the hood and be able to examine a running instance safely (i.e. enough confidence about pulling logs, probing state etc without fearing I might modify state). That’ll mean when I come across such infrastructure I have enough tools to be able to hopefully learn from it.
