Setting Up K3s on Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean launched a managed version of Kubernetes on May of 2018. At someopoint in the fall of 2018 I got beta access to new offering but didn’t really start using it until it became publically available. I started using it when I was ready to replace some Docker “fabric” that I built using Ansible. Its worked for the past few years but it’s painful to get a new service added to it. I have a tendancy to run a fair amount of things privately e.g git or syncthing discovery servers. I had been using Kubernetes at work and was curious to see how well it work on low end boxes, hoping I could leverage existing helm charts etc.
I created a single node cluster and started to play around with it. Everything pretty much work as expected. However I did notice from the monitoring page in the DO console that the box had a fair amount of load for an inactive server runing a few minimal services. Which is kind of to be expected from a managed service and I kind of decided that it might not be a good idea to use it for my purposes and I should seek a lighter weight option.
After digging around I found k3s which promises to be a light weight version of Kubernetes and tracks against newer releases.