elemental VS k3d

First rancheros then k3os now they are onto Elemental. Suffice to say none of these solutions has even lasted long enough to make them worthwhile. I say build a composable template with cloud-init and be done with it.

k3os has been superceded by SLE BCI (https://www.suse.com/products/base-container-images/) and Elementatl (https://github.com/rancher/elemental)

The rancher stack is pretty amazing.

Elemental is pretty close to coreos: https://github.com/rancher/elemental/

They even have a way to build arbitrary os images: https://github.com/rancher/elemental-toolkit

It's pretty great

K3D: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on virtual machines or cloud servers.

k3d is a lightweight wrapper that makes running Kubernetes (specifically, the lightweight k3s distribution) in Docker straightforward and efficient. It's designed to provide developers with a quick and easy way to test Kubernetes without the overhead of setting up a full cluster.

If you customer prefers to run the standard docker engine you could use k3d

You don’t need to run Rancher from a Kubernetes cluster, the rancher/rancher image works fine with Docker (it uses k3d, aka « k3s in docker » : https://k3d.io/).

K3d and Skaffold for local development

If you are a developer and want to learn how to deploy applications to a cluster, getting a cluster up an running can be a daunting task in it's own rights. There are many ways to do it: spinning up local virtual machines and configuring from scratch or using tools like minikube, etc. You may not care for the pain of setting up and configuring a cluster, and if that is you, then the quickest way that I have found is using k3d.