k3d VS csi-driver-smb

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.

https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/csi-driver-smb. This is the CSI driver we use.

Actual media storage (movies, pictures, anything that lives on my unRAID box) is mounted to each pod that needs it via the SMB CSI driver. I would love to use NFS instead, but even with 4.x, I was running into stale file mount issues. You can see my findings and why I decided to use SMB instead here

What is the recommended way to use S3 as shared storage for media (videos)? Currently I'm using SAMBA network share RWX volumes using this plugin and I would like to switch to S3 compatible service to increase performance and to avoid my current limit set by my cloud provider on that SAMBA server of 10 active connections for SAMBA.

With SMB I'm using the CSI SMB Driver helm chart to deploy it. When creating the persistent volume I'm able to use some mounting options where I have the following included:

Kubernetes has a native solution for many different storage integrations - CSI. There is a CSI driver for SMB as well. After installing the driver you will be able to map your config files from smb server via regular volume mount and config map.

I mean, in short either find a project that includes support for it (I don't know of one), or look at a CSI that does like the SMB CSI driver.

Using a CSI Plugin you should be able to separate the admin side from the user side. I haven't dove into this but here is a plugin that might help - https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/csi-driver-smb

Look into using flex volumes (though depricated) or its successor SMB CSI driver