7d ago

Which Kubernetes is the Smallest? Examining Talos Linux, K3s, K0s, and More - Sidero Labs

www.siderolabs.com

6 comments

Keep in mind that this post is by a company that offers one of the options they compare. So there is an obvious conflict of interest, and I wouldn't trust the conclusions that were reached
- And obviously their option is the "best". From the conclusion:
  Talos Linux is unique. It’s the only option that includes OS management in a purpose-built distribution for running Kubernetes. There’s no compromise for scaling up or down. In terms of small-scale numbers, it “wins” in several of the examined categories, including memory usage, disk r/w, and installation size. But all of these metrics are side effects of Talos Linux’s defining characteristic: It’s simple.
  
  Playing with Talos Linux is one of the reasons I switched to NixOS on my main computer, I loved the concept
I find this comparison unfair becuase k3s is a much more batteries included distro than the others, coming with an ingress controller (traefik) and a few other services not in talos or k0s.
But I do think Talos will end up the lighest overall because Talos is not just a k8s distro, but also a extremely stripped down linux distro. They don’t use systemd to start k8s, they have their own tiny init system.
It should be noted that Sidero Labs is the creator of Talos Linux, which another commenter pointed out.
I've been looking at K3s deployed on FCOS, but I have no clue how I'm supposed to use Terraform to deploy FCOS.
My understanding is that FCOS is supposed to be ephemeral and re-deployed every so often, which would imply the use of a hypervisor like Proxmox on the host, but Proxmox does not play well with Terraform.
I also considered OpenStack, but it's way over my head. I have a very simple single-node Kubernetes setup to deploy using GitOps, and nothing seems to fit the bill.
You could try mine, SimpleK8s (kubeadm, containerd, systemd, buildroot), ~50Mb single file (kernel+initramfs). https://simplek8s.org/
The current footprint is lower than every alternatives commented on this article.

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