clusterman VS k3d

kops - Production Grade K8s Installation, Upgrades, and Management silver-surfer - Check ApiVersion compatibility and provide Migration path for Kubernetes objects when upgrading Kubernetes to latest versions Kube-ops-view - Kubernetes Operational View - read-only system dashboard for multiple K8s clusters kubeprompt - Kubernetes prompt info Metalk8s - An opinionated Kubernetes distribution with a focus on long-term on-prem deployments kind - Kubernetes IN Docker - local clusters for testing Kubernetes Clusterman - Cluster Autoscaler for Kubernetes and Mesos Cert-manager - Automatically provision and manage TLS certificates Goldilocks - Get your resource requests "Just Right" katafygio - Dump, or continuously backup Kubernetes objets as yaml files in git Rancher - Complete container management platform Sealed Secrets - A Kubernetes controller and tool for one-way encrypted Secrets OpenKruise/Kruise - Automate application workloads management on Kubernetes https://openkruise.io kubectl snapshot - Take Cluster Snapshots kapp - simple deployment tool focused on the concept of "Kubernetes application" — a set of resources with the same label https://get-kapp.io keda - Event-driven autoscaler for Kubernetes Octant - To better understand the complexity of Kubernetes clusters Portainer - Portainer inside a Kubernetes environment Gardener - Deliver fully-managed clusters at scale everywhere with your own Kubernetes-as-a-Service Kubed - Kubernetes Cluster Operator Daemon Kubestack - Kubestack is the free and open-source GitOps framework to codify your custom platform stack using Terraform.

K3D: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on virtual machines or cloud servers.

k3d is a lightweight wrapper that makes running Kubernetes (specifically, the lightweight k3s distribution) in Docker straightforward and efficient. It's designed to provide developers with a quick and easy way to test Kubernetes without the overhead of setting up a full cluster.

If you customer prefers to run the standard docker engine you could use k3d

You don’t need to run Rancher from a Kubernetes cluster, the rancher/rancher image works fine with Docker (it uses k3d, aka « k3s in docker » : https://k3d.io/).

K3d and Skaffold for local development

If you are a developer and want to learn how to deploy applications to a cluster, getting a cluster up an running can be a daunting task in it's own rights. There are many ways to do it: spinning up local virtual machines and configuring from scratch or using tools like minikube, etc. You may not care for the pain of setting up and configuring a cluster, and if that is you, then the quickest way that I have found is using k3d.