I've had a few questions about Kubernetes and production grade environments and container orchestration.
1. Why Kubernetes? (when mesosphere/dcos is available?)
2. Any available best practices when setting the entire environment from scratch? (right from server level security, to doing data backups for example)
---
As a critic, I thought that if you were running it in production, you'd need 3 masters? (to ensure that if the master goes down, another takes over?)
So with 3 masters, and 2 slaves...the production cost go up to about $25/m. I feel that's too expensive for what you do get (price vs performance) compared to others (I personally feel a production environment running 5 servers from packet.net @ ~180$/m is the way to go [0])
> Why Kubernetes? (when mesosphere/dcos is available?)
Frankly, if you're familiar and comfortable with DCOS, the core financial benefit is the same: increased hardware utilization, assuming your workload can realize that benefit. And if your application is relatively monolithic and handles the same steady load, I'd advise to stay away from advanced orchestration tools because they're only add moving parts and more complexity, unless you have [1]
> Any available best practices when setting the entire environment from scratch?
For education, I would recommend Kelsey's excellent "Kubernetes the Hard Way": https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way
For production, I would recommend Telekube: http://gravitational.com/managed-kubernetes/ It does a lot of extra heavy lifting to make sure your k8s feels like always-on black box (I work there).
[1] Kubernetes also has a "side" benefit of abstracting the underlying infrastructure away, so if you have a use case of running the same complex stack on AWS, colo, vmware, etc then running it on top of a "cloud abstraction layer" lowers your ops/dev costs significantly. We talk about this here: http://gravitational.com/telekube/