k3s VS microk8s

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kubernetes - k3s distribution

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.

You should be familiar with Kubernetes and have set up a Kubernetes cluster. I recommend k3s.

K3s' go.mod[0] is insane.

[0] https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/blob/master/go.mod

And install microk8s:

MicroK8s is a lightweight, batteries included Kubernetes distribution by Canonical designed for running edge workloads which also happens to be developer-friendly and a great choice for building your own homelab. The following lab covers how to install and run MicroK8s on your own edge node running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, deploy the NGINX web service and exposing your NGINX website to the Internet with SSL/TLS enabled using AWS resources included within the Free Tier.

One quick and easy win I can recommend, is microk8s.

I had the same problem (and there's a github issue about this: https://github.com/canonical/microk8s/issues/2186). I swapped to k3s and the usage was half of what microk8s used.

microk8s currently has a showstopping issue that makes it guaranteed to have an irrecoverable failure in HA mode. see https://github.com/canonical/microk8s/issues/3227

k0s is better but also has a lot of bugs. it's the closest to vanilla kubernetes among all the distributions.

> like the simplest GPU support

linux users should be ready to install the nvidia device plugin. if they can't do that, they're never going to succeed in running a gpu accelerated application on their cluster anyway.

> like bootstrapping

in my experience, writing all the bootstrap scripts is painful. but now that there's chatgpt, so much of the drudgery as gone away.

MicroK8S to spin up a Kubernetes cluster

They now power my microk8s/x86 cluster (in addition to my 8-node Raspberry Pi4 ARM64 microk8s cluster), microceph cluster and my LXD cluster, and all are configured with WOL, so I can bring up the cluster from any machine in the homelab, on demand.

We will be using docker and microk8s from Canonical. For running our software during development, we will be using skaffold which is a great tool developed by Google.