K3s adds minor overhead to my single node $8/mo vps.
Edit: no, not managed. Quite easy to get started with though.
Edit2: took ~440MB of ram & 3% CPU (most of the CPU is the local storage provisioner, weirdly?). Why? Because it was much easier than continuing to maintain and run the handcraft Ansible scripts I've done over the years, and let me easily manage DNS, certs, metrics, two dbs, and its easier to reuse these on my other infra than any other option.
I just ran the k3s install script on a vm, and then ran 'systemctl status k3s', and apparently it's using 1.4GB of memory (I haven't started any pods yet). I understand why you might opt for Kubernetes in a multi node cluster, but what does this provide in a single node cluster that you can't achieve with Docker Compose (or Podman Compose)? Not trying to be snarky, I'm legitimately curious.
EDIT: After playing around with this, it appears to scale its memory usage relative to the machine's total available memory. If you run it on a vm with 1GB or less of memory it'll use up roughly half the machine's memory.
Edit: no, not managed. Quite easy to get started with though.
Edit2: took ~440MB of ram & 3% CPU (most of the CPU is the local storage provisioner, weirdly?). Why? Because it was much easier than continuing to maintain and run the handcraft Ansible scripts I've done over the years, and let me easily manage DNS, certs, metrics, two dbs, and its easier to reuse these on my other infra than any other option.