> K3s is a highly available, certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances.
> [microk8s] Low-ops, minimal production Kubernetes,
for devs, cloud, clusters, workstations, Edge and IoT.
Microk8s started as an easy alternative to minikube for local dev.
k3s started as a simplified version of k8s for testing/experimenting on RPis, etc.
Today both seem to focus on IoT/"edge". Both do clustering and HA of the control plane though, so are in theory usable in production.
However, why would you use either of them in production? Yes, it's easier than vanilla k8s, but still has a lot of moving parts, and to top it off, it's a specific flavour by Rancher or Canonical of moving parts ( e.g. microk8s uses dqlite for storage instead of etcd). So you might stumble on specific to the platform edge cases, and you still have a big part of the k8s complexity to deal with ( in the case of microk8s it tries to abstract some of the complexity with wrappers, but when they fail, you're screwed).
> API will keep evolving but basic objects like deployments and statefulsets that you need for paas like experience are quite stable
Stable now, but Ingress was in beta for quite some time, and the when the beta API gets deprecated, you have to adapt.
> [microk8s] Low-ops, minimal production Kubernetes, for devs, cloud, clusters, workstations, Edge and IoT.
Microk8s started as an easy alternative to minikube for local dev.
k3s started as a simplified version of k8s for testing/experimenting on RPis, etc.
Today both seem to focus on IoT/"edge". Both do clustering and HA of the control plane though, so are in theory usable in production.
However, why would you use either of them in production? Yes, it's easier than vanilla k8s, but still has a lot of moving parts, and to top it off, it's a specific flavour by Rancher or Canonical of moving parts ( e.g. microk8s uses dqlite for storage instead of etcd). So you might stumble on specific to the platform edge cases, and you still have a big part of the k8s complexity to deal with ( in the case of microk8s it tries to abstract some of the complexity with wrappers, but when they fail, you're screwed).
> API will keep evolving but basic objects like deployments and statefulsets that you need for paas like experience are quite stable
Stable now, but Ingress was in beta for quite some time, and the when the beta API gets deprecated, you have to adapt.