Light, simple and fast
Rating: 9 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We use K3s Lightweight Kubernetes as a local Kubernetes cluster distribution for local development and when installing Kubernetes virtual clusters. We either use K3s Lightweight Kubernetes with rancher-desktop or k3d running on our workstations or through vcluster when we want to deploy virtual Kubernetes clusters for ephemeral clusters or for testing Kubernetes versions that are not supported by the managed Kubernetes service from the Cloud Provider.
Pros
- Virtual clusters
- IoT devices
- Local development
- Raspberry Pi
Cons
- Option to deploy a self managed k3s in the cloud
- Support to deploy it with kubeadm
- Integration with prometheus & grafana
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Vetted Review
3 years of experience