Simple Comparison of Lightweight K8S Implementations

4 min readJun 30, 2023

There are several Kubernetes implementations in the tech world. In this article, I will simply compare different Kubernetes implementations in a summary.

Minikube

It can work in the operating systems other than Linux.
The setup is pretty straightforward.
By default, it creates a single node cluster but this behavior can be changed by supplying the ` — nodes` parameter.
It’s not suitable for production but can be used in a test environment.
Maintained by main Kubernetes project.
Kubernetes version may be specified with the `— kubernetes-version` parameter.
Supports multiple container runtimes. (e.g. CRI-O, containerd, docker)

minikube start
minikube status
minikube dashboard 
minikube stop
minikube pause
minikube delete

Website: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube
GitHub Stars: 26.8k

Note: We should use the `CSI Hostpath Driver` extension, for a multinode cluster. (See also: Minikube Tutorials Multinode)

K3S/K3D

Developed by Rancher, for mainly IoT and Edge devices.
It can work on most modern Linux systems.
It provides a VM-based Kubernetes environment. We should manually edit nodes and virtual machines for multiple K8S servers.
It is suitable for testing the production environment locally.
It is lightweight and has a low memory footprint due to excluding some features from the Kubernetes binary.
It has an auto-deployment feature. We can deploy the Kubernetes manifests and helm charts by putting them in a specific directory.
It uses SQLite as a default storage backend rather than etcd3.
It has some features like Local Storage Provider, Service Load Balancer, Helm Controller, etc.
It is generally used in performance-constraint environments like IoT devices.

Website: https://k3s.io/
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s
GitHub Stars: 23.4k

K3D is a lightweight wrapper for managing K3S nodes that work in a docker container.

Website: https://k3d.io/
GitHub Repository:https://github.com/k3d-io/k3d
GitHub Stars: 4.5k

sudo k3s server &
k3s agent --server https://k3s.example.com --token mypassword
k3d cluster create myk3dcluster

MicroK8S

It is lightweight K8S, developed by Canonical(a.k.a. Ubuntu)
It sets the cluster to multiple master clusters automatically if the node count exceeds three.
It is suitable for Edge and IoT devices.
It is only for Linux-based operating systems because it is not VM involved, and works as the snaps.
It is mainly focused on simplicity and performance.
It ships with several self-addons. (e.g. Dashboard)

sudo snap install microk8s --classic
microk8s start
microk8s kubectl get nodes
microk8s enable dashboard

Website: https://microk8s.io/
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/ubuntu/microk8s
GitHub Stars: 7.5k

KinD

It means Kubernetes-IN-Docker. It runs k8s inside a docker container.
It supports high availability and multi node clusters.
It is developed by official Kubernetes project maintainers.
It is primarily optimized for CI pipelines.
Due to starting a cluster in a docker container, it can start faster compared to the VM alternatives.
It ships with `kindnetd` as the default CNI plugin but others can be used as well.

kind get nodes
kubectl get nodes
kind delete cluster
docker exec -it kind-control-plane bash

Website: https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kind
GitHub Stars: 11.7k

K0S

It is certificated(CNCF) Kubernetes distribution works on any infrastructure (Cloud, Edge, IoT…)
Calico is the default CNI but `kube-router` also can be used.
It greatly reduces installing and running fully compatible Kubernetes distribution

k0s install controller
k0s kubectl get nodes
systemctl start k0scontroller.service

Website: https://docs.k0sproject.io/v1.27.2+k0s.0/
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/k0sproject/k0s
GitHub Stars: 1100+

Conclusion

Minikube is the easiest to use but it is not suitable for production.
For performance-constraint environments, K3S is easy to use the lightweight Kubernetes implementation.
MicroK8S offers more features in terms of usage but it is more difficult to configure and install than others.
MicroK8S could be a good duo with the Ubuntu operating system.
In resource-constrained environments, it is useful to consider also K0S.
K0S and K3S are similar though if a proper toolchain is in place K0S gives attention to security by providing 100% FIPS compliance.