lsio-mods VS k3s

You can setup your environment creating your own docker mod, a docker mod can bootstrap your environment and install your required packages such as kubectl, helm, awscli, etc. Here is an example of my docker mod used to bootstrap my work environment, this mod install the required packages and bootstrap the config files in the container.

K3s Lightweight Kubernetes

Kubernetes with K3s

A lightweight k3s Kubernetes cluster using k3d

Setting up the Kubernetes cluster and the AWS SQS queue is outside the scope of this article, but you can deploy an Amazon EKS cluster by following this guide, or use k3s as a lightweight, local alternative. For setting up an SQS queue, refer to this tutorial.

Start with small-scale experiments using k3s/k3d

This will initialize K3S (a lightweight Kubernetes distribution), and will configure the Kairos SpinKube bundle we will install in a moment.

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.