ECS is worth a mention [LWN.net]

ECS is worth a mention

Posted Aug 23, 2022 22:34 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: ECS is worth a mention by dw
Parent article: The container orchestrator landscape

This is a rough one. Getting locked into the amazon ecosystem could hurt in the long term, which is full of overcomplicated and difficult services. But container orchestration is often also a huge tarpit of wasted time struggling with overcomplexity.

It's funny, when "open source" meant Linux and Samba to me, it seemed like a world of down to earth implementations that might be clunky in some ways but were focused on comprehensible goals. Now in a world of Kubernetes, Spark, and Solr, I associate it more with engineer-created balls of hair, that you have to take care of with specialists to keep them working. More necessary evils than amplifying enablers.

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ECS is worth a mention

Posted Aug 23, 2022 23:14 UTC (Tue) by dw (guest, #12017) [Link]

"Open source" stratified long ago to incorporate most of what we used to consider enterprise crapware as the default style of project that gets any exposure. They're still the same teams of 9-5s pumping out garbage, it's just that the marketing and licenses changed substantially. Getting paid to "work on open source" might have had some edge 20 years ago, but I can only think of 1 or 2 companies today doing what I'd consider that to have meant in the early 2000s.

As for ECS lock-in, the time saved on a 1 liner SSM deploy of on-prem nodes easily covers the risk at some future date of having to port container definitions to pretty much any other system. Optimistically, assuming 3 days of one person's time to set up a local k8s, ECS offers about 450 node-months before reaching breakeven (450 / 5 node cluster = 90 months, much longer than many projects last before reaching the scrapheap). Of course ECS setup isn't completely free, but relatively speaking it may as well be considered free.

ECS is worth a mention

Posted Aug 25, 2022 1:59 UTC (Thu) by milesrout (guest, #126894) [Link]

>it seemed like a world of down to earth implementations that might be clunky in some ways but were focused on comprehensible goals

For most people it still is. People that just run things normally, the way they always have, just carry on as normal. You don't hear from them because there's nothing to blog about it. It's business as normal. People think that kubernetes and docker and that whole "ecosystem" is far more prevalent than it really is, because when you use such overcomplicated enterpriseware you inevitably have issues and they get talked about. There's just nothing to blog about when it comes to just running a few servers with nginx reverse proxying some internet daemon. It Just Works.