I totally get why you wouldn't want to focus on this out of the gate and agree that Helm isn't necessarily the best option even if you are providing K8s installation artifacts. But I wouldn't write this off so readily...
Kubernetes is due to the operational overhead and costs of using it is pretty high
Using VMs is also very cheap and easy for most people that want to self host Forem.
There may be classes of users you're not considering here.
Those who are already operating or using a managed Kubernetes service.
Those who have access to a multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster that is managed for them.
For those using managed Kubernetes having to provision and manage raw VMs for this might actually impose higher burdens and cost.
I personally would be way more likely to deploy Forem to one of my existing clusters (especially if its just a kubectl apply away) to kick the tires than I would be to provision EC2 instances specifically for it.
It's not written off at all Tim. Installing Forem to Kubernetes is a valid use case for a percentage of people that have access to a working cluster and I think we should support something down the road. What I am arguing is that most people do not have such access or understanding of operating code on k8s. Not to mention Kubernetes based deployments are total overkill for most users and use cases.
It's just a matter of providing the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time users that want to self host Forem. VMs with Containers is the path we picked. Pretty boring I know... :)
We're a small consulting shop, and we use Kubernetes because it's cheaper to share infrastructure between our clients than is it to launch a dedicated instance per project with bespoke infrastructure. It would definitely be more complex and expensive for the communities we manage to use a custom Ansible setup than it would be to use a helm chart, and managed Kubernetes is very easy to launch on Digital Ocean, and relatively easy on other providers. Do you have a lot of communities using Forem that have knowledge of how to maintain Ansible but not Kubernetes? These days, I find managing a cluster much simpler, and I think many other small community hosting providers would too.
I'd be happy to write the helm chart up myself and share it with the community, but right now I can't find guidelines in your self hosting doc for how I could use containers for anything but running it locally. Are the containers in the docker-compose file the same ones I should be using in production? If not, are there other guidelines for which containers should be used and how they should be hooked up?
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I totally get why you wouldn't want to focus on this out of the gate and agree that Helm isn't necessarily the best option even if you are providing K8s installation artifacts. But I wouldn't write this off so readily...
There may be classes of users you're not considering here.
For those using managed Kubernetes having to provision and manage raw VMs for this might actually impose higher burdens and cost.
I personally would be way more likely to deploy Forem to one of my existing clusters (especially if its just a
kubectl applyaway) to kick the tires than I would be to provision EC2 instances specifically for it.It's not written off at all Tim. Installing Forem to Kubernetes is a valid use case for a percentage of people that have access to a working cluster and I think we should support something down the road. What I am arguing is that most people do not have such access or understanding of operating code on k8s. Not to mention Kubernetes based deployments are total overkill for most users and use cases.
It's just a matter of providing the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time users that want to self host Forem. VMs with Containers is the path we picked. Pretty boring I know... :)
We're a small consulting shop, and we use Kubernetes because it's cheaper to share infrastructure between our clients than is it to launch a dedicated instance per project with bespoke infrastructure. It would definitely be more complex and expensive for the communities we manage to use a custom Ansible setup than it would be to use a helm chart, and managed Kubernetes is very easy to launch on Digital Ocean, and relatively easy on other providers. Do you have a lot of communities using Forem that have knowledge of how to maintain Ansible but not Kubernetes? These days, I find managing a cluster much simpler, and I think many other small community hosting providers would too.
I'd be happy to write the helm chart up myself and share it with the community, but right now I can't find guidelines in your self hosting doc for how I could use containers for anything but running it locally. Are the containers in the docker-compose file the same ones I should be using in production? If not, are there other guidelines for which containers should be used and how they should be hooked up?