Let’s say you want to install a piece of software on your desktop. Let’s make it more fun and say you want to install the latest, coolest, most awesomest (yes, I just made that word a thing!) video game. What’s the first thing you want to check before you buy it? You normally would check the system requirements. How much CPU power does it need? Do you need to buy more RAM? Will it be fine on HDDs (spinning disks) or does it require SSDs? Should you install (and therefore maintain/operate) some liquid-based cooling mechanism on your machine? These are very important questions to ask because it will affect your overall gaming experience. Depending on your preferences, you might get by with the minimum requirements or you might want to soup up your gear before proceeding. It’s really a function of “how much of the total experience do you want to have?” and “how much of it can you afford?”
Source: http://a.co/1TMg0s6
This is the same with Kubernetes. It’s capable of delivering an HA experience provided you give it the recommended resource requirements but if the cost of doing that is too steep and you don’t mind giving up HA (in the case of short-lived or throw-away environments), you can go with the minimum set. So what are these different levels of the “Kubernetes experience” and their respective “system requirements?” Here’s a video that talks about some of them:
So now the question is: what is the level of Kubernetes experience that you want and how much of its resource requirements can you afford? Let’s discuss!
Thanks to the fine folks at kubernetes.slack.com for the help. Shout out to mauilion and Matthias Rampke for answering my n00b questions!