AWS EC2 is pretty stupid

At least that was my thought back in 2010

Rob Hirschfeld hosts a DevOps Distance Learning session every Tuesday at 1:00CT. Today we covered an open-source HCI platform named Harvester. The solution supports managing VMs at the edge using Kubernetes Kurbvirt. My initial thought was that this is stupid. If you need to run VMs at the edge, why not just use a 1U or 2U Amazon Outposts, VMware vSphere, or even KVM?

One of the delegates reminded me that if you are a born in Kubernetes administrator, the process of managing VMs via Kubernetes makes sense operationally. If you were to introduce something like vSphere for the edge for these developers, they’d find themselves lost.

It reminded me of when I ran an EC2 instance for the first time. Then, I was extremely familiar with vSphere. I couldn’t imagine a situation where I’d want to provision a VM via the AWS control panel much worse via CLI. But, 10-years later, it’s safe to say I get it.

It’s a reminder about the context in which consumers will use a solution. Running VMs via Kubevirt may not be the most efficient solution for someone with a vSphere background. It may be the best way with someone with operational knowledge based on Kubernetes.