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K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

k3s.io

131–140 of 196 posts

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#131
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very acceptable on my local servers that run my mail, web, mastodon, etc servers. I prefer the configuration in kubenetes templates instead of spread all over my filesystem in /etc (config in one place and fucking unit files in another), /var/lib, /opt, etc.

Right, you've acquired the taste. But why should people who haven't acquired the taste do this? To me seems like a mountain of unneeded complexity compared to just running a local webserver directly in a docker container with "docker run --restart always ".

Because when your docker server gets smoked, what happens? If you're using Swarm or Nomad or k8s, there's an argument there. `docker run` isn't.

I've very recently moved over to a home k3s cluster--a couple old desktops and some relatively new ARM SBCs with NVMe slots. I don't use it at work, at least not directly, but it's been the least-painful solution I've found to run stuff; once you understand the model (not trivial but not crazy) and find the headspace to explain why things in k8s are the way they are, reasoning through it is pretty easy (which is really just the story of any moderately complex system, exacerbated in a few ways because of some Google-attitude carryover), and I can also yank half the machines out of the cluster before an application fails.

(Both Swarm and Nomad are fine tools, but the lack of easy resources to get up to speed led to me failing them out of consideration.)

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#132
post #103

Kubernetes seems like an "acquired taste". Either you use it a lot (likely at work) and are therefore comfortable using it outside of work as your one-size-fits-all solution to everything, or else you don't use it a lot and see it as a complexity behemoth that hides all of your system behind esoteric CLIs and config files that just make everything a nightmare to manage.

[deleted]

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#133
post #124

I've been using a 3 nuc (actually Ryzen devices) k3s on SuSE MicroOS https://microos.opensuse.org/ for my homelab for a while, and I really like it. They made some really nice decisions on which parts of k8s to trim down and which Networking / LB / Ingress to use. The option to use sqlite in place of etcd on an even lighter single node setup makes it super interesting for even lighter weight homelab container environ…

Thanks for your perspective. How has your experience been with Longhorn? Performance, flexibility, issues, maintenance...? I'm interested in moving away from a traditional single-node NAS to a cluster of storage servers. Ceph/Rook seem daunting, and I'd prefer something easy to setup and maintain, that's performant, reliable and scales well. Discovering issues once you're fully invested in a storage solution is a nig…

I wouldn't really treat it as a replacement for a NAS, mostly only for the container workloads running on kubernetes itself... Ideally, any apps you develop should use something more sane like object storage (Minio etc) for their data.

I push it pretty minimally right now, so no great performance testing myself, and I do run it in synchronous mode, so that means its write performance is likely going to be limited to the 1gbps network it syncs over.

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#134
post #124

I've been using a 3 nuc (actually Ryzen devices) k3s on SuSE MicroOS https://microos.opensuse.org/ for my homelab for a while, and I really like it. They made some really nice decisions on which parts of k8s to trim down and which Networking / LB / Ingress to use. The option to use sqlite in place of etcd on an even lighter single node setup makes it super interesting for even lighter weight homelab container environ…

Thanks for your perspective. How has your experience been with Longhorn? Performance, flexibility, issues, maintenance...? I'm interested in moving away from a traditional single-node NAS to a cluster of storage servers. Ceph/Rook seem daunting, and I'd prefer something easy to setup and maintain, that's performant, reliable and scales well. Discovering issues once you're fully invested in a storage solution is a nig…

I can't speak to performance because the workloads aren't really intense, but I run a small 3 node cluster using k3s and Longhorn and Longhorn has been really great.

It was easy to setup and has been reliably running with very minimal maintanence since.

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#135
If I remember correctly, the new F5 BIG IP instances also internally use k3s under the hood. That's probably it's efficient resource usage. But this is also an evidence, at least for me, on the stability of k3s.

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all of those can be used to host a highly available multi physical node cluster?

It makes sense to use full Kubernetes in that case. The lightweight distributions are good for single instances or limited multiple nodes. Like homelabs, edge nodes, or local development. But hosting application in data center makes sense to use full Kubernetes.

As I said, there's not a "full kubernetes".

If you are in a datacenter, it's best to use the K8s distributed by that datacenter (EKS for AWS, for example).

The EKS provided by a datacenter will have integrations with external to Kubernetes resources you will almost certainly want (like storage, DNS records, or load balancers).

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can be said of many systems, does hashicorp document it though? I’m guessing they must, otherwise that would be the first thing you hear on the other side of a support call.

also with hashicorps new licensing regime...

That does not impact 99% of ppl..

The licence change impacts only companies like Digger or Spacelift that build their platform abusing TF oss offering.

Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes

#140

How is K3s pronounced?

from their docs: https://docs.k3s.io/

> We wanted an installation of Kubernetes that was half the size in terms of memory footprint. Kubernetes is a 10-letter word stylized as K8s. So something half as big as Kubernetes would be a 5-letter word stylized as K3s. There is no long form of K3s and no official pronunciation.

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