So why should I do all of that instead of throwing a little money at AWS, run ECS and actually spend my time creating my product?
Heck, if my needs are simple enough why should I even use ECS instead of just putting my web app on some VM's in an auto-scaling group behind a load balancer and used managed services?
I don't think anyone is arguing that you should use k8s for a simple web app. There's definitely some inherent stack complexity threshold before solutions like k8s/mesos/nomad are warranted.
When you start having several services that need to fail and scale independently, some amount of job scheduling, request routing... You're going to appreciate the frameworks put in place.
My best advice is to containerize everything from the start, and then you can start barebones and start looking at orchestration systems when you actually have a need for it.
-you can use small EC2 instances behind an application load balancer and within autoscaling groups with host based routing for request routing.
- converting a stand-alone api to a container is not rocket science and nor should it require any code rewrite.
- if you need to run scheduled Docker containers that can also be done with ECS or if it is simple enough lambda.
- the first thing you should worry about is not “containerization”. Its getting product market fit.
As far as needing containerization for orchestration, you don’t need that either. You mentioned Nomad. Nomad can orchestrate anything - containers, executables, etc.
Not to mention a combination of Consul/Nomad is dead simple. Not saying I would recommend it. In most cases (I’ve used it before), but only because the community and ecosystem is smaller. But if you’re a startup, you should probably be using AWS or Azure anyway so you don’t have to worry about the infrastructure.
How are you managing your infrastructure and if you have that already automated how much effort is it to add the software you develop to that automation vs the ROI of adding another layer of complexity ?
The idea everything needs to be in containers is similar to the idea everything needs to be in k8s.
Let the business needs drive the technology choices don't drive the business with the technology choices
Portability - the idea being that you can migrate to an orchestration technology that makes sense when you have the need. The cost and effort of containerizing any single service from the get-go should be minimal. It also helps a lot with reproducibility, local testing, tests in CI, etc.
Valid reasons to not run containerized in production can be specific security restrictions or performance requirements. I could line up several things that are not suitable for containers, but if you're in a position of "simple but growing web app that doesn't really warrant kubernetes right now" (the comment I was replying to), I think it's good rule of thumb.
The overhead managing a container ecosystem to run production is not trivial. IF you are doing this in a service then by all means leverage that package methodology.
If you are managing your systems who already have a robust package management layer then adding the container stacks on top of managing the OS layers you have just doubled the systems your operations team is managing.
Containers also bring NAT and all sorts of DNS / DHCP issues that require extremely senior well rounded guys to manage.
Developers dont see this complexity and think containers are great.
Effectively containers moves the complexity of managing source code into infrastructure where you have to manage that complexity.
The tools to manage source code are mature. The tools to manage complex infrastructure are not mature and the people with the skills required to do so ... are rare.
> If you are managing your systems who already have a robust package management layer then adding the container stacks on top of managing the OS layers you have just doubled the systems your operations team is managing.
Oh yeah, if you're not building the software in-house it's a lot less clear that "Containerizate Everything!" is the answer every time. Though there are stable helm charts for a lot of the commonly used software out there, do whatever works for you, man ;)
> Containers also bring NAT and all sorts of DNS / DHCP issues that require extremely senior well rounded guys to manage.
I mean, at that point you can just run with host mode networking and it's all the same, no?
Having worked with ECS 2.0 when Fargate was released, the setup was much harder to use from operations standpoint the moment you needed anything more complex (not to mention any kind of state) than k8s. Just getting monitoring out of AWS was annoyance involving writing lambda functions to ship logs...
And I'll be blunt that CloudWatch, especially logs, aren't all that hot in actual use. It might have gotten better, but all places I worked for last two years if they used AWS they depended on their own log aggregation, even if using AWS-provided Elastic Search.
Heck, if my needs are simple enough why should I even use ECS instead of just putting my web app on some VM's in an auto-scaling group behind a load balancer and used managed services?