docker VS k3s

Btw They have a homeassistant image now https://github.com/linuxserver/docker homeassistant

Finally the main reason for us is the choice of runtime. We have very decent container runtimes (RKE, RHOS, K3s) available to deploy applications. We are very familiar with them, and they offer us a lot of functionality. These all support containers primarily.

I used K3S in my cluster because it is a lightweight, stripped-down version of Kubernetes that’s ideal for running on resource-constrained devices like Raspberry PIs I plan to use in my home lab cluster. K3S can be installed through a shell script:

In the last few years, we’ve witnessed the introduction of several new lightweight Kubernetes distributions. SUSE’s Rancher Labs k3s project was one of the earliest. Canonical now includes Microk8s in Ubuntu. And k0s is a single-binary Kubernetes distribution.

K3S is a Kubernetes distribution made by Rancher, made to be as lightweight as possible while being compatible with Kubernetes production standards.

Jeff led me to K3s using Ansible, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution that is perfect for my home cluster and a pre-defined way of installing it because I don't have pre-requirements nor the idea on how to set it up otherwise.

Still requires SRE but alot easier than it used to be: https://www.talos.dev/v1.8/

Also, k3s. https://k3s.io/

I'm torn between https://k0sproject.io and https://k3s.io to use in CI and production.

Any suggestions or personal experience?

What you also can do is starting with just a single node, incredibly easy to install with e.g. https://k3s.io/. You still have to invest the upfront effort to understand how it works but you can already reap a lot of benefits with a lot less complexity.

Kubernetes does not force you into the distributed systems hell, you can go that route later, or never.

> Gosh, I'm so happy I was able to jump of the k8s hype train. This is not something SMBs should be using. Now I happily manage my fleet of services without large infra overhead via my own paas over Docker Swarm. :)

I mean, I also use Docker Swarm and it's pretty good, especially with Portainer.

To me, the logical order of tools goes with scale a bit like this: Docker Compose --> Docker Swarm --> Hashicorp Nomad / Kubernetes

(with maybe Podman variety of tools where needed)

I've yet to see a company that really needs the latter group of options, but maybe that's because I work in a country that's on the smaller side of things.

All that being said, however, both Nomad and some K8s distributions like K3s https://k3s.io/ can be a fairly okay experience nowadays. It's just that it's also easy to end up with more complexity than you need. I wonder if it's going to be the meme about going full circle and me eventually just using shared hosting with PHP or something again, though so far containers feel like the "right" choice for shipping things reasonably quickly, while being in control of how resources are distributed.

The author is using https://k3s.io/ not the full k8s, so it doesn't have to be extremely expensive.