MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT • Hacker News Board

MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#1

Post by punnerud » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT
microk8s.io

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#2

Post by m1ghtym0 » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 6:53 AM UTC

How does it compare against minikube? Seems to be based on Snaps vs minikube's VM-based approach. Any other major pros/cons?

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#3

Post by polskibus » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:11 AM UTC

I thought Kubernetes is not great for environments with poor network connectivity, which is quite common when dealing with Edge and IoT scenarios. Has that changed?

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#4

Post by Kostic » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:22 AM UTC

From all of the low-ops K8s distributions, k3s[0] is the best from perspective of inital setup, maintenance and usage on less powerful hardware.

There are even now higher-level tools such as k3os and k3sup to further reduce the initial deployment pains.

MicroK8s prides with 'No APIs added or removed'. That's not that positive in my book. K3s on the other hand actively removes the alpha APIs to reduce the binary size and memory usage. Works great if you only use stable Kubernetes primitives.

[0] https://k3s.io/

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#5

Post by hardwaresofton » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:24 AM UTC

Deploying k8s has gotten a lot easier these days -- some alternatives in this space:

- https://docs.k0sproject.io (https://github.com/k0sproject/k0s)

- https://k3s.io (https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/)

k0s is my personal favorite and what I run, the decisions they have made align very well with how I want to run my clusters versus k3s which is similar but slightly different. Of course you also can't go wrong with kubeadm[0][1] -- it was good enough to use minimally (as in you could imagine sprinkling a tiny bit of ansible and maintaining a cluster easily) years ago, and has only gotten better.

[0]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/setup-tools/kubeadm/

[1]: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#6

Post by kissgyorgy » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

If anybody seriously believe that Kubernetes is good on Edge and IoT, our industry is in deep trouble. I usually like Canonical, but this is next level bullshit.

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#7

Post by alexellisuk » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:28 AM UTC

polskibus wrote: post #3

I thought Kubernetes is not great for environments with poor network connectivity, which is quite common when dealing with Edge and IoT scenarios. Has that changed?

Yes it's changed massively, but it's recent - only since 2019.

I am the creator of the k3sup (k3s installer) tool that was mentioned and have a fair amount of experience with K3s on Raspberry Pi too.

You might also like my video "Exploring K3s with K3sup" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1kEF-Jd9pw

https://k3sup.dev/

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#8

Post by detaro » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:29 AM UTC

polskibus wrote: post #3

I thought Kubernetes is not great for environments with poor network connectivity, which is quite common when dealing with Edge and IoT scenarios. Has that changed?

Do you mean connectivity to the outside, or inside the cluster? The examples of Kubernetes and similar things in such scenarios I've seen usually had stable connectivity between nodes. E.g. an edge scenario would be one tiny well-connected cluster per location, remote-controlled over the (bad) external link through the API.

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#9

Post by alexellisuk » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

Kostic wrote: post #4

From all of the low-ops K8s distributions, k3s[0] is the best from perspective of inital setup, maintenance and usage on less powerful hardware. There are even now higher-level tools such as k3os and k3sup to further reduce the initial deployment pains. MicroK8s prides with 'No APIs added or removed'. That's not that positive in my book. K3s on the other hand actively removes the alpha APIs to reduce the binary size…

Thanks for mentioning K3sup [0]

I used Microk8s on a client project late last year and it was really painful, but I am sure it serves a particular set of users who are very much into the Snap/Canonical ecosystem.

In contrast, K3s is very light-weight and can be run in a container via the K3d project.

If folks want to work with K8s upstream or development patches against Kubernetes, they will probably find that KinD is much quicker and easier.

Minikube has also got a lot of love recently, and can run without having a dependency on Virtual Box too.

[0] https://k3sup.dev/ [1] https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/docs/user/quick-start/

Re: MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT

#10

Post by qbasic_forever » Thu, Jul 22, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

kissgyorgy wrote: post #6

If anybody seriously believe that Kubernetes is good on Edge and IoT, our industry is in deep trouble. I usually like Canonical, but this is next level bullshit.

Why? In its smallest form k8s is a few go processes handling a proxy and some container scheduling/runtime logic.

Sure if you run an entire control plane on the edge you're adding more complexity... but you don't have to do that, and control planes are complex beasts by their nature.