rancher VS k3s

Compare rancher vs k3s and see what are their differences.

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rancher k3s
89 293
22,670 26,784
0.5% 1.1%
9.9 9.6
9 days ago 7 days ago
Go Go
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rancher

Posts with mentions or reviews of rancher. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-08-25.
  • OpenTF Announces Fork of Terraform
    28 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Aug 2023
    Did something happen to the Apache 2 rancher? https://github.com/rancher/rancher/blob/v2.7.5/LICENSE RKE2 is similarly Apache 2: https://github.com/rancher/rke2/blob/v1.26.7%2Brke2r1/LICENS...
  • Kubernetes / Rancher 2, mongo-replicaset with Local Storage Volume deployment
    1 project | /r/codehunter | 14 Jun 2023
    I follow the 4 ABCD steps bellow, but the first pod deployment never ends. What's wrong in it? Logs and result screens are at the end. Detailed configuration can be found here.
  • Trouble with RKE2 HA Setup: Part 2
    2 projects | /r/rancher | 8 May 2023
  • Critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-22651) in Rancher 2.7.2 - Update to 2.7.3
    1 project | /r/rancher | 24 Apr 2023
    CVE-2023-22651 is rated 9.9/10 : https://github.com/rancher/rancher/security/advisories/GHSA-6m9f-pj6w-w87g
  • What's your take if DevOps colleague always got new initiative / idea?
    1 project | /r/devops | 17 Apr 2023
    Depends. When I came into my last company I immediately noticed the lack of reproducible environments. Brought this up a few times and was met with some resistance because "we didn't have the capacity"... Until prod went down and it took us 23 hours to bring it back up due to spaghetti terraform.
  • Questions about Rancher Launched/imported AKS
    1 project | /r/rancher | 14 Apr 2023
    For the latest releases of rancher: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases When is Rancher 2.7.1 going to be released? The Rancher support matrix for 2.7.1 shows k8s v1.24.6 as the highest supported version and Azure will drop AKS v1.24 in a few months... Should this be a concern for us? What could happen if we create our cluster with Rancher for an unsupported K8s version? 1.25 for example. - Rancher 2.7.2 just got released including support for 1.25. I have however tested running unsupported versions before, unless there is major deprecations in the kubernetes API it is fine in my experience. If we move to AKS imported clusters, in case we add node pools, and upgrade the cluster, will those changes be reflected in the Rancher Platform? - Yep! If we face some issues by running an unsupported K8s version on Rancher Launched K8s clusters, is it possible to remove it from Rancher, do the stuff we need, and then import it into the platform? - Yes, however be careful and do testing before doing in prod. From top of mind: Remove cluster from rancher (if imported), if rancher created you might want to revoke ranchers SA key for the cluster first (so it can't remove it). Delete the cattle-system namespace, and any other cattle-* namespaces you don't want to keep. And do your thing. It looks like AKS is faster than Rancher regarding supported Kubernetes versions... We would like to know if Rancher will always be on track with AKS regarding the removal of K8s version support and new versions. - In my experience yes. (Been using rancher on all three clouds for a 4 years now). What are exactly the big differences between imported AKS and Rancher-launched AKS? What should we look at, and what issues can we face when using one or another? - The main difference is that rancher will not be able to upgrade the cluster for you. You will have to do that yourself.
  • rancher2_bootstrap.admin resource fail after Kubernetes v1.23.15
    1 project | /r/rancher | 29 Mar 2023
    variable "rancher" { type = object({ namespace = string version = string branch = string chart_set = list(object({ name = string value = string })) }) default = { namespace = "cattle-system" # There is a bug with destroying the cloud credentials in version 2.6.9 until 2.7.1 and will be fixed in next release 2.7.2. # See https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/39300 version = "2.7.0" branch = "stable" chart_set = [ { name = "replicas" value = 3 }, { name = "ingress.ingressClassName" value = "nginx-external" }, { name = "ingress.tls.source" value = "rancher" }, # There is a bug with the uninstallation of Rancher due to missing priorityClassName of rancher-webhook # The priorityClassName need to be set # See https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/40935 { name = "priorityClassName" value = "system-node-critical" } ] } description = "Rancher Helm chart properties." }
  • Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow
    1 project | /r/Futurology | 22 Mar 2023
    When I searched DuckDuckGo instead, the 12th link actually had the real answer. It's in this issue on Rancher's GitHub. Turns out the Rancher admin needs to be in all of the Keycloak groups they want to have show up in the auto-populated picklist in Rancher. Being a Keycloak admin and even creating the groups isn't good enough. Frustratingly, the "caveat" note the Rancher guy is pointing to that says this is only present in the guide to setting up Keycloak for SAML, but apparently this is also true for OIDC.
  • How to enable TLS 1.3 protocol
    1 project | /r/networking | 14 Mar 2023
    Explicitly set TLS 1.3 in Rancher, though it could be a bug in Rancher: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/35654
  • Rancher deployment, hanging on login and setup pages
    1 project | /r/rancher | 23 Feb 2023
    Thanks. Yeah looks like this might work: https://github.com/rancher/rancher/releases/tag/v2.7.2-rc3

k3s

Posts with mentions or reviews of k3s. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-06-12.
  • 26 Top Kubernetes Tools
    18 projects | dev.to | 12 Jun 2024
    K3s is another compact Kubernetes distribution. Developed by SUSE, it's packaged as a single binary that comes in at less than 70MB. Despite this tiny footprint, K3s is certified as compatible with upstream Kubernetes, is ready for production use, and supports high availability.
  • Ask HN: Are there any open source forks of nomad smd consul?
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 May 2024
    Opinionated meaning it picks, install, patches your CNI/Ingress/Load Balancer/DNS Server/Metrics Server/Monitoring Setup.

    k3s is probably most well known as it ships with bunch of preinstall software: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s so you can just start throwing yaml files at cluster and handling workloads. It's what I use for my homelab.

    Paid things I've heard of include OpenStack and SideroLabs. Haven't used personally by SRE coworkers say good things about them.

  • Linux fu: getting started with systemd
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2024
    For self-hosting I've found https://k3s.io to be really good from the SUSE people. Works on basically any Linux distro and makes self-hosting k8s not miserable.
  • Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2024
    Yes it’s going to depend on which k8s distribution you’re using. We have work in-progress for k3s to natively support nix-snapshotter: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/pull/9319

    For other distributions, nix-snapshotter works with official containerd releases so it’s just a matter of toml configuration and a systemd unit for nix-snapshotter.

    We run Kubernetes outside of NixOS, but yes the NixOS modules provided by the nix-snapshotter certainly make it simple.

  • 15 Options To Build A Kubernetes Playground (with Pros and Cons)
    4 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2024
    K3S: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes that is designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on a virtual machine or cloud server.
  • FLaNK 25 December 2023
    33 projects | dev.to | 26 Dec 2023
  • K3s Traefik Ingress - configured for your homelab!
    3 projects | dev.to | 15 Dec 2023
    I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.
  • Best way to deploy K8s to single VPS for dev environment
    5 projects | /r/kubernetes | 10 Dec 2023
  • Single docker compose stack on multiple hosts. But how?
    2 projects | /r/docker | 10 Dec 2023
    Kubernetes - k3s distribution
  • Building a no-code Helm UI with Windmill - Part 1
    3 projects | dev.to | 6 Dec 2023
    I’ve created a local cluster with K3S and installing Windmill could not be simpler with just one chart to configure, which already has sane defaults to get started. For this demo we will also configure workers to passthrough environment variables to our scripts so that they have access to the Kubernetes API server for later.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rancher and k3s you can also consider the following projects:

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

k0s - k0s - The Zero Friction Kubernetes

lens - Lens - The way the world runs Kubernetes

kubespray - Deploy a Production Ready Kubernetes Cluster

microk8s - MicroK8s is a small, fast, single-package Kubernetes for datacenters and the edge.

Nomad - Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that can deploy a mix of microservice, batch, containerized, and non-containerized applications. Nomad is easy to operate and scale and has native Consul and Vault integrations.

kubesphere - The container platform tailored for Kubernetes multi-cloud, datacenter, and edge management ⎈ 🖥 ☁️

cluster-api - Home for Cluster API, a subproject of sig-cluster-lifecycle

Docker Compose - Define and run multi-container applications with Docker

k9s - 🐶 Kubernetes CLI To Manage Your Clusters In Style!

InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
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SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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