K3s is great but I'll also shout out that RKE2 is almost as simple to install as K3s but its full Kubernetes.
K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
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Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#82k3s is my preferred way to run k8s locally, for the purpose of developing helm charts locally. It's way more lightweight than minikube, and with k3d it's way easier to use as well.
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no real "over kubernetes". K3s is a kubernetes implementation. You have to think of k8s as more of a specification of what can be done with multiple implementations. k3s, kind, microk8s, minikube are all implementations of kubernetes that you might want to try out. k8s is much like the original IBM pc or a linux distribution. There are a bunch of interchangeable parts that you may land on depending on your ne…
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.
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#84I'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…
Funny: I've been running a Talos cluster for the past six months, and just today decided to look into k3s. Talos has a lot of really nice things, but I have found that the lack of shell access can be frustrating at times when trying to troubleshoot.
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#85"Lightweight Kubernetes" and then a graph involving 2 different nodes with 10+ services running on them. Nomad seems to be a truly "lightweight Kubernetes" and for the small amount of time I've been using it, it seems to do it's job really well and it's easy to understand all the moving pieces without spending countless of hours reading docs and source code. Although, it's hard to recommend Nomad for future uses as i…
Nomad seems to be a truly "lightweight Kubernetes"
k3s requirements: 1 node, 512MB RAM, 1 CPU core
Nomad requirements: "Nomad servers may need to be run on large machine instances. We suggest having between 4-8+ cores, 16-32 GB+ of memory, 40-80 GB+ of fast disk and significant network bandwidth."
https://docs.k3s.io/installation/requirements
https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/docs/install/productio...
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#86"Lightweight Kubernetes" and then a graph involving 2 different nodes with 10+ services running on them. Nomad seems to be a truly "lightweight Kubernetes" and for the small amount of time I've been using it, it seems to do it's job really well and it's easy to understand all the moving pieces without spending countless of hours reading docs and source code. Although, it's hard to recommend Nomad for future uses as i…
Nomad also doesn't have nearly half of the features that Kubernetes does. Need service discovery? Set up a Consul cluster. Need secret management? Install vault. Need vault enterprise? Install a separate Consul cluster! This was a few years ago, maybe it's changed? I dunno. Anyway, lightweight here means that whole bunch of external dependencies have been ripped out. E.g. AWS/GCP/Azure and I believe other things too.
> Need service discovery? Set up a Consul cluster. Need secret management? Install vault.
I am not an expert in this topic, but I read that they added lightweight solutions for both usecases inside nomad in latest version.
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 neither a long-form of K3s nor official pronunciation.
So wouldn't it be K4s? I can't figure out how they got 3.
len(kubernetes) == 10 -> k8s
half(kubernetes) == 5 -> k3s
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#88Can this tool help to simplify self hosting implems? K3s was recommended to me to replace my personal pile of systemd units starting docker compose configs and manual reverse proxy configs. Im am completely oblivious to how k8s works.
People often say kubernetes is complex, or overkill for tasks. But let's say you have many computers and want to put them to work. Suddenly, kubernetes becomes the simplest of all options. > Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler . - Einstein
Lol no. Docker Swarm, Nomad, even ancient Pacemaker are all simpler and easier to use than k8s. I don't think there's a single feature k8s adds over those options that is actually useful in a non-Enterprise use case (especially homelab stuff, assuming the point of your homelab is not learning k8s).
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#89Can this tool help to simplify self hosting implems? K3s was recommended to me to replace my personal pile of systemd units starting docker compose configs and manual reverse proxy configs. Im am completely oblivious to how k8s works.
systemd units are fine. It's even pretty close to the recommendations for podman.
You can use something like Ansible to make it a bit easier, if that even makes sense in your use case.
Re: K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nomad also doesn't have nearly half of the features that Kubernetes does. Need service discovery? Set up a Consul cluster. Need secret management? Install vault. Need vault enterprise? Install a separate Consul cluster! This was a few years ago, maybe it's changed? I dunno. Anyway, lightweight here means that whole bunch of external dependencies have been ripped out. E.g. AWS/GCP/Azure and I believe other things too.
You can have sd and secrets with just nomad now, it is perfect for small projects in that way. K8s also can do secrets! base64 encoded secrets! But in case you need a more secure solution. Please pull in a Vault helm chart or mess around with sops or whatever. Want to scale out? See how long it will take you until you will have to move your etcd to dedicated hw/vm's. And let me tell you - setting up external etcd in…
K8s supports encryption at rest, ACLs and audit logs.
What it actually lacks is versioning, and a dynamic secrets engine, though you could build that with an operator, and things like the postgres-operator do.
You also don't get the whole sealing thing, but I'd argue that's more annoying than useful.