Simon Willison’s Weblog

Carving the Scheduler Out of Our Orchestrator (via) Thomas Ptacek describes Fly’s new custom-built alternative to Nomad and Kubernetes in detail, including why they eventually needed to build something custom to best serve their platform. In doing so he provides the best explanation I’ve ever seen of what an orchestration system actually does. # 2nd February 2023, 9:46 pm

Two reasons Kubernetes is so complex (via) I like how this article proposes that Kubernetes isn’t trying to be a tool for deploying containers—it’s more like an operating system for a cluster of machines, responsible for the same kind of goals as a regular operating system such as resource sharing and portability. And since everything is built as control loops which attempt to modify actual state to fit the declarative desired state, errors can occur asynchronously seconds or even minutes after the desired state has been updated. # 27th January 2022, 6:25 pm

Smooth sailing with Kubernetes (via) Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics) authored this comic introduction to Kubernetes, and it’s a really good explanation of the core concepts. I’d love to have something like this for Datasette—I still feel like I’m a long way from being able to explain the project with anything like this amount of clarity. # 1st July 2021, 11:30 pm

Experiences with running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes (via) Fascinating interview that makes a solid argument for the idea that running stateful data stores like PostgreSQL or Cassandra is made harder, not easier when you add an orchestration tool like Kubernetes into the mix. # 13th August 2018, 2:30 pm