rke2 VS k3s

In this essay, we showed how to use Rancher rke2 to deploy a Kubernetes cluster with 6 Debian nodes with firewall enabled. We've also covered deploying Cilium as a CNI for our cluster and have it completely replace kube-proxy so as to increase speed and gain more observability via Cilium tools. This article also showed how to deploy Metallb to manage IP pools and load balance traffic for those IP pools. Throughout this guide, we assumed that we have an external load balancer that will distribute traffic to our workload and control plane nodes. For further information please visit rke2 official documents: "https://docs.rke2.io/".

In this blog post, we will demonstrate how easy and fast it is to deploy Sveltos on an RKE2 cluster with the help of ArgoCD, register two RKE2 Cluster API (CAPI) clusters and create a ClusterProfile to deploy Prometheus and Grafana Helm charts down the managed CAPI clusters.

Did something happen to the Apache 2 rancher? https://github.com/rancher/rancher/blob/v2.7.5/LICENSE RKE2 is similarly Apache 2: https://github.com/rancher/rke2/blob/v1.26.7%2Brke2r1/LICENS...

To provision all of my clusters, I use Rancher with RKE2. The primary Rancher server is hosted on a bootstrapped RKE2 cluster running on a VPS.

Golang has burned me more than once with bizarre design decisions that break things in a user hostile way.

The last one we ran into was a change in Go 1.15 where servers that presented a TLS certificate with the hostname encoded into the CN field instead of the more appropriate SAN field always fail validation.

The behavior could be disabled however that functionality was removed in 1.18 with no way to opt back into the old behavior. I understand why SAN is the right way to do it but in this case I didn’t control the server.

Developers at Google probably never have to deal with 3rd parties with shitty infrastructure but a lot of us do.

Here’s a bug in rke that’s related https://github.com/rancher/rke2/issues/775

just looking at this myself. I think k3s has more support for arm, but looking through the github repo there are a lot of bugs indicating its a mess. RKE2 seems to be their big push, they also have a github issue open that has been open for the last 2 releases that they are going to add a update path from k3s to rke2. https://github.com/rancher/rke2/issues/881

RKE (https://rancher.com/docs/rke) and RKE2 (https://docs.rke2.io/) from Rancher folks

Opinionated meaning it picks, install, patches your CNI/Ingress/Load Balancer/DNS Server/Metrics Server/Monitoring Setup.

k3s is probably most well known as it ships with bunch of preinstall software: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s so you can just start throwing yaml files at cluster and handling workloads. It's what I use for my homelab.

Paid things I've heard of include OpenStack and SideroLabs. Haven't used personally by SRE coworkers say good things about them.

For self-hosting I've found https://k3s.io to be really good from the SUSE people. Works on basically any Linux distro and makes self-hosting k8s not miserable.

Yes it’s going to depend on which k8s distribution you’re using. We have work in-progress for k3s to natively support nix-snapshotter: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/pull/9319

For other distributions, nix-snapshotter works with official containerd releases so it’s just a matter of toml configuration and a systemd unit for nix-snapshotter.

We run Kubernetes outside of NixOS, but yes the NixOS modules provided by the nix-snapshotter certainly make it simple.

K3S: is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes that is designed for resource-constrained environments. It is an excellent option for running Kubernetes on a virtual machine or cloud server.

I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.

Kubernetes - k3s distribution

I’ve created a local cluster with K3S and installing Windmill could not be simpler with just one chart to configure, which already has sane defaults to get started. For this demo we will also configure workers to passthrough environment variables to our scripts so that they have access to the Kubernetes API server for later.

You should be familiar with Kubernetes and have set up a Kubernetes cluster. I recommend k3s.