| > k8s doesn't really weigh you down, especially if tuned for the low end use case (k1s). Sorry, what "k1s" are you referring to? The only projects with that name that I see are either cut-down management CLIs and GUIs that only work with a preexisting Kubernetes cluster, or years-old abandoned proof-of-concept/alpha-grade Kubernetes reimplementations that are completely unsuitable as a Kubernetes replacement. The only actually-functional cut-down Kubernetes I'm aware of is 'minikube'. Minikube requires -at minimum- 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. [0] That doesn't fit on either of the machines 'nrdvana' was talking about... not the "tiny ... digital ocean droplet", with its 1CPU, 1GB of RAM, and 25GB of disk space [1], nor the "tiny linode" (which has roughly the same specs [2]). Given that it's not at all uncommon for discarded laptops to have 4 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and like 250GB of disk, eating 1/4th of the RAM, (intermittently) half of the CPU power, and roughly a tenth of the disk space just for Kubernetes housekeeping kinda sucks. That's pretty damn "heavy", in my judgment. So. Do you have a link to this 'k1s' thing you were talking about? Does it use less than 2 CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and 20GB of disk? [0] <https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/> [1] <https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets#see-what-you-...> [2] <https://www.akamai.com/cloud/pricing#title-7ba40063be> [3] [3] Did you know that Linode got bought by Akami? I didn't! |
There are a couple of things here: first off, minikube isn't tuned for low resources, it's a full k8s packaged for developers. Second, it doesn't burn much CPU at all unless you blew it up and it's churning pods. Third, try to remember that you're running a tool that provides most of what you need to run a service, it's not a bare VM, it comes with reverse proxy, tons of tools, and cluster management.
Basically those minimal specs let you actually run quite a lot of stuff on that minikube, they're not just for the management system.
k0s needs roughly 500MB RAM and 1.5GB drive to run a controller+worker. Can probably pare k3s down to that as well.
And I repeat, this gets you single pane cluster management across all your laptops, reverse proxy, DNS, resource shaping, namespaces, etc. Only big problem with it is that adding distributed storage is quite heavy and unstable (longhorn) or really heavy (ceph), so storage management might need to be manual which is a pain in k8s.