> clusters should be treated like cattle, not pets
Heh... how many teams actually treat their clusters like cattle, though? Every time I advocate automation around cluster management, people start complaining that "you don't have to do that anymore, we have Kubernetes!"
Some people get it, yes, but even of that group, few have the political will/strength to make sure that automation is set up on the cluster level—especially to a point where you could migrate running production workloads between clusters without a potentially large outage / maintenance window.
For any real production system you have to use terraform and their ilk to manage clusters, as you need to be spinning up and down dev/qa/prod clusters.
I don't know GCP though. In the past I've seen kube cluster archs which are very very fragile as they spin up. If that's the case with GCP I can see why you wouldn't do the above and rather hand hold their creation.
I would love if this happened in the real world, but for every well-architected automated cluster management setup I’ve seen using Terraform, Ansible, or even shell scripts and bubble gum, there are five that were hand-configured in the console and poorly (or not at all) documented, and might not be able to re-create without a substantial multi-day effort.
Heh... how many teams actually treat their clusters like cattle, though? Every time I advocate automation around cluster management, people start complaining that "you don't have to do that anymore, we have Kubernetes!"
Some people get it, yes, but even of that group, few have the political will/strength to make sure that automation is set up on the cluster level—especially to a point where you could migrate running production workloads between clusters without a potentially large outage / maintenance window.