K8s vs serverless for distributed systems

Listener Joe Davidson recently tweeted: “I’d really be interested in an episode debating Kubernetes vs serverless functions for distributed systems. As someone working a lot with serverless to create large scale systems, for me the complexity in Kubernetes doesn’t seem worth it, especially when onboarding new people. But I’d like to see it from the other perspectives. I could be missing something.”

So we invited Joe on the show alongside Abdel Sghiouar and Srdjan Petrovic to discuss!

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Featuring:

• Joe Davidson – Twitter, GitHub
• Abdel Sghiouar – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Srdjan Petrovic – Twitter
• Natalie Pistunovich – Twitter, GitHub

Show Notes:

• Cncf landscape
• Article: Shifting left is for suckers. Shift down instead
• Service Weaver
• Firebase
• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized world
• CloudRun
• Knative
• Fargate
• Dapr
• Azure Container Apps
• Kelsey Hightower’s Tweet on k8s becoming an operating system for the cloud

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - It's Go Time!
(00:45) - Introducing the guests
(03:06) - Do we need this complexity?
(08:52) - Sponsor: Changelog News
(11:02) - Joe's experience with Kubernetes
(13:48) - K8s does more than functions
(21:35) - Srdjan, what are you working on?
(27:01) - go run
(28:23) - Buildpacks
(33:17) - Cross-service communication
(39:10) - Concern for portability
(43:24) - Teeing up part 2
(45:55) - Outro

Episode source