kubespray VS ansible-role-k3s

When it came to deployment, I had several options, and I chose the hard way: deploying Kubernetes on bare metal nodes using KubeSpray. Troubleshooting bare metal Kubernetes deployments honed my skills in pinpointing issues. This hands-on experience provided a deep understanding of how each component, like the Control Plane, kubelet, Container Runtime, and scheduler, interacts to orchestrate containers.

Worth noting that if you like ansible, Kubespray has had documented air-gap installation since 2018 https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray/commit/963c3479...

calico v3.7.3 kubernetes v1.16.0 installed via kubespray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

About 1yr ago I ran k8s with 300 nodes using kube spray https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray . Never had any real issue with it. We did finally move to the cloud though.

I would highly recommend https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubespray

We build our own distro called Compliant Kubernetes, and we use (a fork of) kubespray to install the base Kubernetes layer. Our distro is entirely open source, so you can use it as a reference, if you want.

If you want to run Kubernetes on VM's you can look into kubespray and play around with the options for installing and checking the configuration after the fact.

There is another very good ansible role for k3s, actually better than mine

if you have experience with ansible you can use https://github.com/PyratLabs/ansible-role-k3s

Not OP but there's an excellent galaxy ansible role for k3s and it's idempotent, so if you want to upgrade to a newer version of k3s or tweak settings, or add a node it's supported.

Take it to the next level and let git be the source of truth for k8s using Flux! My home cluster repo is exactly that plus I'm using the ansible-k3s-role Galaxy role. It's based on this k8s at home template.

If you are comfortable with ansible there's a nice Galaxy role that I use.

Experience has been good so far but this is the first I saw of KubeEdge. I’m going to give it an evaluation. I used Ansible https://github.com/PyratLabs/ansible-role-k3s to set up the cluster with some minor adaptions and cleanup scripts.