So, let's say you want to deploy server instances. Let's keep it simple and say you want to have 2 instances running. You want to have zero-downtime-deployment. And you want to have these 2 instances be able to access configuration (that contains secrets). You want load balancing, with the option to integrate an external load balancer. And, last, you want to be able to run this setup both locally and also on at least 2 cloud providers. (EDIT: I meant to be able to run it on 2 cloud providers. Meaning, one at a time, not both at the same time. The idea is that it's easy to migrate if necessary)

This is certainly a small subset of what kubernetes offers, but I'm curious, what would be your goto-solution for those requirements?

That's an interesting set of requirements though. If that is indeed your set of requirements then perhaps Kubernetes is a good choice.

But the set seems somewhat arbitrary. Can you reduce it further? What if you don't require 2 cloud providers? What if you don't need zero-downtime?

Indeed given that you have 4 machines (2 instances, x 2 providers) could a human manage this? Is Kubernetes overkill?

I ask this merely to wonder. Naturally if you are rolling out hundreds of machines you should, and no doubt by then you have significant revenue (and thus able to pay for dedicated staff) , but where is the cross-over?

Because to be honest most startups don't have enough traction to need 2 servers, never mind 4, never mind 100.

I get the aspiration to be large. I get the need to spend that VC cash. But I wonder if Devops is often just premature and that focus would be better spent getting paying customers.

"Imagine you are in a rubber raft, you are surrounded by sharks, and the raft just sprung a massive leak - what do you do?". The answer, of course, is to stop imagining.

Most people on the "just use bash scripts and duct tape" side of things assume that you really don't need these features, that your customers are ok with downtime and generally that the project that you are working on is just your personal cat photo catalog anyway and don't need such features. So, stop pretending that you need anything at all and get a job at the local grocery store.

The bottom line is there are use cases, that involve real customers, with real money that do need to scale, do need uptime guarantees, do require diverse deployment environments, etc.

I think you are proving the point; there are very, very few applications that need to run on two cloud providers. If you do, sure, use Kubernetes if that makes your job easier. For the other 99% of applications, it’s overkill.

Apart from that requirement, all of this is very doable with EC2 instances behind an ALB, each running nginx as a reverse proxy to an application server with hot restarting (e.g. Puma) launched with a systemd unit.

My personal goto-solution for those requirements -- well 1 cloud provider, I'll follow up on that in a second -- would be using ECS or an equivalent service. I see the OP was a critic of Docker as well, but for me, ECS hits a sweet spot. I know the compute is at a premium, but at least in my use-cases, it's so far been a sensible trade.

About the 2 cloud providers bit. Is that a common thing? I get wanting migrate away from one for another, but having a need for running on more than 1 cloud simultaneously just seems alien to me.

Do you know of actual (not hypothetical) cases, where you could "flip a switch" and run the exact same Kubernetes setups on 2 different cloud providers?

I've worked at tiny startups before. Tiny startups don't need zero-downtime-deployment. They don't have enough traffic to need load balancing. Especially when you are running locally, you don't need any of these.

Why does a startup need zero-downtime-deployment? Who cares if your site is down for 5 seconds? (This is how long it takes to restart my Django instance after updates).

We’ve been deploying software like this for a long ass time before kubernetes.

There’s shitloads of solutions.

It’s like minutes of clicking in a ui of any cloud provider to do any of that. So doing it multiple times is a non issue.

Or automate it with like 30 lines of bash. Or chef. Or puppet. Or salt. Or ansible. Or terraform. Or or or or or.

Kubernetes brings in a lot of nonsense that isn’t worth the tradeoff for most software.

If you feel it makes your life better, then great!

But there’s way simpler solutions that work for most things

A script that installs some dependencies on an Ubuntu vm. A script that rsyncs the build artifact to the machine. The script can drain connections and restart the service using the new build, then onto the next VM. The cloud load balancer points at those VMs and has a health check. It's very simple. Nothing fancy.

Our small company uses this setup. We migrated from GCP to AWS when our free GCP credits from YC ran out and then we used our free AWS credits. That migration took me about a day of rejiggering scripts and another of stumbling around in the horrible AWS UI and API. Still seems far, far easier than paying the kubernetes tax.

0 downtime. Jesus Christ. Nginx and HAProxy solved this shit decades ago. You can drop out a server or group. Deploy it. Add it back in. With a single telnet command. You don’t need junk containers to solve things like “0 downtime deployments”. That was a solved problem.

For something this simple, multi-cloud seems almost irrelevant to the complexity. If I’m understanding your requirements right, a deployment consists of two instances and a load balancer (which could be another instance or something cloud-soecific). Does this really need to have fancy orchestration to launch everything? It could be done by literally clicking the UI to create the instances on a cloud and by literally running three programs to deploy locally.

Serverless containers.

Effectively using Google and Azure managed K8s. (Full GKE > GKE Autopilot > Google Cloud Run). The same containers will run locally, in Azure, or AWS.

It's fantastic for projects but and small. The free monthly grant makes it perfect for weekend projects.

Cloud Run. Did you read the article?

Migrating to another cloud should be quite easy. There are many PaaS solutions. The hard parts will be things like migrating the data, make sure there's no downtime AND no drift/diff in the underlying data when some clients write to Cloud-A and some write to CLoud-B, etc. But k8 do not fix these problems, so..