Microk8s is great for local development, but it's operational complexity doesn't come close to run k8s in a production environment.
Habing been on both sides of the isle, in my opinion, K8s has great ux for consumers, but for is a nightmare for ops teams who maintain it. For a self-hosted version anyway.
That's good to know— I've heard others say that it's fine if you just have a cluster of a few nodes, private cloud, that kind of thing, particularly if it's "throwaway" compute like CI workers, as opposed to something genuinely high availability.
Now, all that said, Canonical certainly advertises microk8s as being production-ready, production-grade, and suitable for use in production environments, for example in [1]. It definitely seems like it's meant to be far more serious than, say, minikube, which explicitly is just for local development.
Can you speak to specific limitations with microk8s, or point to resources which go into more depth on this?
Great question, I have been research around the same topic for past 6-8 months. The problem is they have been advertising as production grade very recently. I am not sure what limitation you will hit. Having said that, k3s running in production has same issue that you will see in managed kubernetes cluster in a cloud provider.
MicroK8s and K3s are actually touted as orchrestrator for production too. I actually know atleast one organization that uses k3s in production. Ofcourse it is a nightmare at scale, but running a services without kubernetes at that scale is more nightmarish.
Habing been on both sides of the isle, in my opinion, K8s has great ux for consumers, but for is a nightmare for ops teams who maintain it. For a self-hosted version anyway.