“Installing your own Kubernetes is hard!”
Everybody
“Hold my kubectl!”
Rancher
Who is this article for:
This is written for those of us who’s interested by Kubernetes and would like to install and run it easily and cheaply anywhere. You may already know that installing and running a “full” Kubernetes all by yourself can be rather difficult, the learning curve is really steep.
There are many alternatives out there – one of the solutions to the complexity is subscribing to one of the managed Kubernetes offerings in the cloud, for example Oracle OKE. Rancher Labs came up with another interesting solution, modifying and considerably slimming down a standard distribution.
K3S is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution made by Rancher Labs, targeted to edge computing, IoT devices and ephemeral infrastructure deployments (for example created in CI/CD pipelines). It can run on Intel and ARM processors.
I would say it’s a great case for learning and development environments too. It even runs on Raspberry Pi! Should you run your critical production workloads in k3s? Not sure this is a good idea, Rancher certainly doesn’t position it like that.
In this article I’m going to describe the installation steps needed to install K3S on OCI in an Oracle Linux VM, but pretty much any cloud or local install will be very similar. Was it as easy as advertised? Keep reading 🙂