nerve

to the ground and redid it. I've never had that hassle in k8s. Its designed to succeed, in a way the "box of parts" approach doesn't. Boxes of parts are useful. For a complexity-sensitive & thoughtful infrastructure engineer, having something like the old Synapse/Nerve[1] system with your apps distributed across some 5-20 machines with a monitor lease to spawn new ones on failure would probably approximate Kubernetes for a few years, until you have to do something fancypants. You've still reimplemented part of Kubernetes, though... The other angle is, boxes of parts can go in wildly weird directions.... if you need it. Looking at some infrastructure these days professionally, the question is - when do we move to Kubernetes. It's not interesting or useful to the company to be maintaining our own thing or own strange path. The only questions are around the path - how much rework needs to happen and how much building in k8s needs to happen to get there. GKE is a very good starting point for k8s. Strong recommend. n.b. With respect to the cost. I consider this a professional investment / professional development expense. Spending $100-$200/month on a software engineer's salary is a reasonable return for being able to readily say I have experience in a current topic. Also I can run my own apps. :) https://github.com/airbnb/nerve

ch we wanted to avoid. Our configuration also looked less like SmartStack when we first rolled it out - we were primarily focused on direct service-to-service communication without going through a load balancer, and we expected to be querying the Consul API directly. The shape of Consul felt like it better fit what we were trying to do. We've ended up diverging from that over time as we learned more about how Consul and our software interacted in production, and what we have now ended up looking more similar to SmartStack than what we started with. There aren't a _ton_ of different ways to think about service discovery (and more broadly, service-to-service communication). One of my coworkers wrote[2] about this some in the context of Envoy[3], which also looks a lot like SmartStack. It's not terribly surprising to me that a lot of them converge over time - e.g. the insight of trading consistency for availability is key. [1] https://github.com/airbnb/nerve [2] http://lethain.com/envoy-design/ [3] https://lyft.github.io/envoy/

alking to whom. we can analyse this both in our logs via logstash and in real-time using datadog's haproxy monitoring integration, and it's been invaluable. however, this definitely deserves a look if you're interested in, for instance, load-balancing UDP traffic