Do I need it? No. Do I want to use it because of the superior tooling? Yes.
Honestly. Give yourself a month to learn it and migrate your home lab and it's actually not too difficult. Yes it takes a lot of debugging initially, but like most things, once you're familiar, it becomes easy.
The fact that another engineer stands a chance of being able to see my cluster & have some basic idea how it works—that a k8s system self describes itself fairly well— is a superpower. Even if it remains yours and only yours, having a common reference frame to discuss your computing adventures in, being able to break out the great pieces others have made: it's so much more compelling to me than cobbling together your one off special pet of a system.
I use Rancher for a hosted Kubernetes cluster on top of dozens of dedicated servers, and so far, it has been super nice. What are the alternatives for CI/CD for a small team (30)?
k3s is dead simple to install. Install rancher on top if you like a nice web GUI, or don't if you are fine with kubectl. The software you want to run on k8s probably has helm charts which make it easy to run.
You don't need kubernetes in the same way you don't need a fast internet service. Sure you can work with dial up, but working with 1gbps internet line is just so much more convenient
I initiated and led the Kubernetes adoption at the startup I'm with currently. Handed it off to the new ops team recently. The company is dramatically better off now in terms of scaling, deployment automation, configuration management, service discovery, internal service interactions, stability, reliability... The list goes on.
If your needs are met by a VM or three then sure, you may not need Kubernetes, although as other comments have pointed out, distributions like k3s can be useful even in those environments. But as you climb the scale and complexity ladder, there soon comes a point where it's very hard to beat Kubernetes, which is why it has become so widespread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=735568
Do I need it? No. Do I want to use it because of the superior tooling? Yes.
Honestly. Give yourself a month to learn it and migrate your home lab and it's actually not too difficult. Yes it takes a lot of debugging initially, but like most things, once you're familiar, it becomes easy.
The fact that another engineer stands a chance of being able to see my cluster & have some basic idea how it works—that a k8s system self describes itself fairly well— is a superpower. Even if it remains yours and only yours, having a common reference frame to discuss your computing adventures in, being able to break out the great pieces others have made: it's so much more compelling to me than cobbling together your one off special pet of a system.
I use Rancher for a hosted Kubernetes cluster on top of dozens of dedicated servers, and so far, it has been super nice. What are the alternatives for CI/CD for a small team (30)?
k3s is dead simple to install. Install rancher on top if you like a nice web GUI, or don't if you are fine with kubectl. The software you want to run on k8s probably has helm charts which make it easy to run.
You don't need kubernetes in the same way you don't need a fast internet service. Sure you can work with dial up, but working with 1gbps internet line is just so much more convenient
I initiated and led the Kubernetes adoption at the startup I'm with currently. Handed it off to the new ops team recently. The company is dramatically better off now in terms of scaling, deployment automation, configuration management, service discovery, internal service interactions, stability, reliability... The list goes on.
If your needs are met by a VM or three then sure, you may not need Kubernetes, although as other comments have pointed out, distributions like k3s can be useful even in those environments. But as you climb the scale and complexity ladder, there soon comes a point where it's very hard to beat Kubernetes, which is why it has become so widespread.