Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) vs. K3s Lightweight Kubernetes

[Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)] is great when you need to be able to deploy a large number of services in a highly repeatable way. Once you know how to use it, it is a very fast to stand up a new environment. However there is a lot you need to know to get to that point and it is a specialized area. This is not suitable for small teams who are supporting multiple product stacks.

Incentivized

K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is well suited for local development. K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is not well suited when you need backward support. In the case that you want to test an application that is still using deprecated APIs or CRDs which are supported on popular managed Cloud Kubernetes Distributions, because K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is trying to be a lightweight application and dropping early support for APIs/CRDs marked for deprication K3s Lightweight Kubernetes will not be a good solution. If you are trying to test Kubernetes etc, functionality, K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is not a good case since it's using Dqlite or SQLite.

Incentivized

• To scale the microservices very easily.
• Easy to set up in CI/CD pipeline.
• It has a good pricing option as well in Azure. Basic works fine.
• Accelerates containerized application development for the developers.

Incentivized

• Virtual clusters
• IoT devices
• Local development
• Raspberry Pi

Incentivized

• GUI on azure portal need to enhanced.
• The feature set should be matching with Openshift which is also kubernetes based
• Troubleshooting errors

Incentivized

• Option to deploy a self managed k3s in the cloud
• Support to deploy it with kubeadm
• Integration with prometheus & grafana

Incentivized

Barring certain missing features such as operator management , open cluster management, it does gives lot of options to host containerized applications. The GUI may be improved and can give user more insights to the cluster rather than using command line tools. The integration with standard azure monitoring tools is a big plus to use Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Incentivized

Microsoft support was really good, whenever we raise any ticket they come back to us within a couple of hours.

Incentivized

Worked with very similar in-house-built Kubernetes/container management system. We are leveraging AKS as it's more robust and stable being in the technical space for quite some time. Also, it has got a vast number of management and security features which makes it more attractive. They even have a model where the cost can be reduced by up to 90% if the application can afford to handle a quick downtime once in a while.

Incentivized

We have mostly used kind, minikube, and Docker Desktop Kubernetes for local development. Only kind has lower resource requirements, but K3s Lightweight Kubernetes seems to be even lighter. It is a big benefit to be able to deploy a K3s Lightweight Kubernetes cluster in seconds locally in our workstation, there is no cost, and it makes it easy to redeploy from scratch no matter how many times we want. The removal of deprecated APIs or CRDs also makes it more secure since it reduces unnecessarily exposed attack vectors.

Incentivized

• The ability to scale has reduced the need for headcount in IT
• The authentication process has kept us compliant with regulatory bodies
• The ability to replicate environments is great.

Incentivized

• Engineers have been able to run more microservices locally with K3s Lightweight Kubernetes instead of Minikube, which is more resources hungry

Incentivized