• brie
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    2 days ago

    Triton and SmartOS are still Sun Microsystems people. Solaris zones preceded Linux containers by almost a decade. They lost the popularity contest, so they have to provide compatibility with kube and docker. I think infrastructure containers are zones with extra whistles.

    For even better performance, I’d go with Xen and Linux unikernel. The startup time can be just 1s with such minimum overhead. It also greatly reduces the attack surface. I highly doubt you’ll be allowed for such a drastic change though.

    • FrederikNJS@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      My team is constantly looking for new technologies to make sure we’re not turning ourselves into dinosaurs. We all know that Kubernetes won’t last forever, something better will come along some day.

      That being said I don’t really see the full value of Triton or Xen with unikernels… They might have a bit less performance overhead if used correctly, but then again Kubernetes on bare metal also has very little overhead.

      Kubernetes is certainly comes with a learning curve, and you need to know how to manage it, but once you have Kubernetes there’s a ton of nifty benefits that appear due to the thriving community.

      Need to autoscale based on some kind of queue? Just install the Keda helm chart

      Running in the cloud and want the cluster to autoscale the nodes? Just install cluster-autoscaler helm chart

      Want to pick up all of your logs and ship them somewhere? Just install the promtail helm chart

      Need a deployment tool? Just install the ArgoCD helm chart

      Need your secrets injected from some secret management solution? Just install the external-secrets helm chart

      Need to vulnerability scan all the images you are using in your cluster? Just install the trivy-operator helm chart

      Need a full monitoring stack? Just install the kube-prometheus-stack helm chart

      Need a logging solution? Just install the loki helm chart

      Need certificates? Just install the cert-manager helm chart

      The true benefit of Kubernetes isn’t Kubernetes itself, but all the it’s and pieces the community has made to add value to Kubernetes.

      • brie
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        19 hours ago

        That’s what I meant. It’s a standard, and the sunk cost and network effect make it practical. Same as HTTP and SSL compared to SCTP and IPSec. Isn’t it sad when you see web devs preferring native apps even more than the general public?

        Packaging is very practical, but that’s a boring dead end that unfortunately lasted 20+ years. I mentioned Triton in the context of Sun folks who have done containers better and earlier, yet failed to market because Sun went bankrupt. Your long list that was packaged is nothing that can’t be developed in-house better with far less complexity. Triton provides no benefit to you, but who knows maybe you’ll need dtrace one day.

        Unikernels and Xen allow function as a service (I assume you don’t need that as well). FaaS is the future, as it’s a progression of the micro services trend. Startup time and hardening are not of interest to you as well, so no reason to switch.

        I’m not completely against packaging. It’s great for open source desktop apps. When it’s out of sight away from the user, it turns into a boring game.