How Big Data Supports Gen AI (2024-05-20)

Kubernetes is Cool, But ...

Kubernetes is cool, and I think it's really useful in helping us scale and manage multiple systems easily in a fault-tolerant way. Actually, I don't think Kubernetes per se is important itself; more it seems that the idea of some orchestration engine to manage containers and systems is what really matters. As a side note, there are other orchestrators such as Mesos, OpenShift, and Nomad.

However, do we need to know Kubernetes to use it for databases? This is a data platform newsletter, and most of us work with databases in some way. I do see more databases moving to the cloud, and a few moving to containers. I was thinking about this when I saw a Simple Talk article on Kubernetes for Complete Beginners. It's a basic article that looks at what the platform consists of, how it works, and how to set up a mini Kubernetes platform on your system. It's well written and interesting, but ...

Do we need to know anything about it? Are we running databases in containers, or will we? I think it's possible that we might run any of our databases in containers. They are like lightweight VMs and there isn't a reason why we wouldn't run a database in a container. With external storage, of course, which gives you a cluster-like environment where your storage moves to a new node if the first one fails. That's a good use case. Deploying consistent environments quickly is a good use case. Using Kubernetes to manage the containers is great, but ...

I don't think we need to know much about Kubernetes. I don't think most of us should run it and should outsource any container orchestration to the cloud if we decide to implement database containers. These orchestration engines are quite complex today, and there is a lot of expertise needed to manage them. I don't know that expertise is worth trying to find, train, and retain for most organizations. We should just outsource the container management to someone else.

We might need to know how we change the configuration of some resources, but that's minor knowledge, and really, I suspect that outsourced K8S (shorthand for Kubernetes) will have GUI tools that let you easily pick and choose the CPUs, memory, etc. and then an export of the JSON or YAML or whatever is needed for the config. Most of us likely need the skills to export, save (in a VCS) the files, and then submit them to the cluster.

A few years ago I went through a bunch of courses and reading material on Kubernetes. I set up some small clusters, I experimented with pods, I even was excited to think about managing containers for various services. What I discovered is that Kubernetes is complex, hard, and something I want someone else to run. Once I set up a cluster in Azure I thought I'd never want to do this on-premises again.

Much like email. I have run email servers, but ...

I'd like to never run one again, which is how I feel about Kubernetes.

I think containers have proven more complex and harder to work with than many people thought. I know there are plenty of people using them, but it's a minority. I see many more organizations still building monoliths, or microservices that run as processes, or client-server apps. Not that many people are excited and using containers. That may change, and if you go to the cloud, containers give you portability that many other solutions don't, so I'd recommend them there. However, they are still a bit immature, and hard to manage. I think it will be a while before we see lots of databases on containers.

Even if we do, I'm not sure we need to learn Kubernetes as database people.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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