microk8s VS multipass

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.

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Multipass I love Multipass for quick Ubuntu instances spun up for testing or as a playground. Wish I would have known and used of it sooner.

If you just need Ubuntu then you can try "Multipass" from Canonical (https://multipass.run/). Works quite well on my M2 Air. I haven't tried using Linux GUI with it though as I need only terminal based VMs.

Multipass is pretty clutch for trivial VMs on MacOs for sure. I use it for a bunch of ssh jump boxes running vpns to different sites. The macOS build does not support custom images (lest not without [some truly insane hacks](https://github.com/canonical/multipass/issues/1260#issuecomm...) , which doesn’t really matter for what I use it for but it is kind of a bummer. If you need something with a little more grunt but don’t want to go full blown with writing your own QEMU tooling or fussing with something like UTM or Parallels, [quickemu](https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu) is a really nice qemu wrapper with sane defaults that can expose a whole lot of power if you need it.

I would be cautious or even distrustful of using anything from Oracle. VirtualBox components come under three different licenses - GPLv2, personal use & evaluation license, and an enterprise license. Their VirtualBox license FAQ [1] gives them enough leeway to change future licenses at will. If an exploit is discovered in your old VirtualBox and they've changed the license, you're out of luck.

We've moved our development to KVM and Virtual Machine Manager on Linux [3] and UTM on Mac [4]. There are other options to run your VM, such as Multipass [5] or VirtualBuddy [6].

On a digressive topic - it was fun migrating our legacy application server stack from Oracle Java (old & poorly considered decision) to OpenJDK, thanks to their license [2].

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ

[2] https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javase/jdk-faqs.htm...

[3] https://ubuntu.com/blog/kvm-hyphervisor

[4] https://mac.getutm.app/

[5] https://multipass.run/

[6] https://github.com/insidegui/VirtualBuddy

How does it compare to https://multipass.run/?

If you have a reasonably beefy computer, you can always try setting up Multipass and set up 2-3 nodes for a k8s cluster, it's how I'm doing my own certification training. I do have a k3s Raspberry Pi cluster, but with Pi prices being what they are still it'd almost be cheaper to do a cloud setup. ☹️

Whenever I need a VM on my MacOS I reach out to Multipass[1].

It is a project by Canonical and has a decent amount of features to get the job done. However, it only supports Ubuntu VMs and has some rough edges.

[1] https://multipass.run/