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k3s-io
k3s
Go2018–2026
k3s-io / k3s

k3s

Lightweight Kubernetes

Systems & InfrastructureDevOps & Cloud
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29Distinct people
33Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
34.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Lightweight Kubernetes

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year33 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-09-26 21:22:25 UTC to 2026-05-03 03:00:35 UTC.

0369122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 6 submissions, 6 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1266
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

33 sources
nextaccountic·May 3, 2026
https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s#whats-with-the-name > What's with the name? > We wanted an installation of Kubernetes that was half the size in terms of memory footprint. Kubernetes is a 10 letter word stylized as k8s. So something half as big as Kubernetes would be a 5 letter word stylized as K3s. A '3' is also an '8' cut in half vertically. There is neither a long-form of K3s nor official pronunciation. k3k is a play on k3s but k3s is itself a play on words (k3s is supposed to be half the size of k8s, which stands for kubernetes)
In K3k: Kubernetes in Kubernetes
stackskipton·May 2, 2024
Opinionated meaning it picks, install, patches your CNI/Ingress/Load Balancer/DNS Server/Metrics Server/Monitoring Setup. k3s is probably most well known as it ships with bunch of preinstall software: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s so you can just start throwing yaml files at cluster and handling workloads. It's what I use for my homelab. Paid things I've heard of include OpenStack and SideroLabs. Haven't used personally by SRE coworkers say good things about them.
In Ask HN: Are there any open source forks of nomad and consul?
hinshun·Mar 16, 2024
Yes it’s going to depend on which k8s distribution you’re using. We have work in-progress for k3s to natively support nix-snapshotter: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/pull/9319 For other distributions, nix-snapshotter works with official containerd releases so it’s just a matter of toml configuration and a systemd unit for nix-snapshotter. We run Kubernetes outside of NixOS, but yes the NixOS modules provided by the nix-snapshotter certainly make it simple.
In Nix is a better Docker image builder than Docker's image builder
Difwif·Oct 11, 2023
k3s users: I tried using k3s a few years back and on a fresh single node setup I was seeing ridiculous system usage with 0 deployments. Something like 20-30% cpu load. The same system with a k8s deployment using kubeadm was 3-5% without a deployment. There's this issue that goes back to 2019 that got closed without any real resolution. I moved on but I'm curious if anyone else has measured this? https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/issues/294
In K3s – Lightweight Kubernetes
KronisLV·Aug 8, 2023
> What does it mean that k3s is “certified”? Should I care? What’s the tradeoff? I think that maybe I should have linked directly to the K3s GitHub, which goes into detail about what it is, what the components are, as well as links to more information about testing: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/ Kubernetes is a large and complex system, but doing end to end tests aims to ensure that various implementations work correctly, they have pretty in depth docs on all of this, including conformance tests in particular: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contribu... So, if a distribution passes all of these, then it's likely that it will give you fewer unpleasant surprises. Here's a list: https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/ > When you mentioned Traefik my eyes glazed over. Well, you typically do need an ingress
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controller that will allow exposing services to the outside and direct network traffic. Traefik is liked by some, less so by others, but generally works okay - except that its documentation (for K3s in particular) isn't as abundant as it would be when using Nginx. For example, if you want to use a custom SSL/TLS certificate (without ACME) for all domains by default, figuring that out might take a while. That said, if you don't like it, technically you could swap it for something else, however I personally had a cluster hang once while doing that due to some cleanup action getting stuck. There are plenty of options: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr... > Is there a picture of how all this fits together? One not created by a consultant selling their services? I actually found their diagrams to be surprisingly sane: https://docs.k3s.io/architecture However, do be warned that there are many different ways how to build clusters that might have significant differences. K3s is just one of the Kubernetes distros - that attempt to provide an opinionated view on how to mix and match the components out there to end up with something that will let you use Kubernetes and have things actually work as expected at the end of the day. A bit like how we have OS distros like Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and so on.
In Kubernetes Exposed: One YAML Away from Disaster
hardwaresofton·Jul 22, 2021
Deploying k8s has gotten a lot easier these days -- some alternatives in this space: - https://docs.k0sproject.io (https://github.com/k0sproject/k0s) - https://k3s.io (https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/) k0s is my personal favorite and what I run, the decisions they have made align very well with how I want to run my clusters versus k3s which is similar but slightly different. Of course you also can't go wrong with kubeadm[0][1] -- it was good enough to use minimally (as in you could imagine sprinkling a tiny bit of ansible and maintaining a cluster easily) years ago, and has only gotten better. [0]: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/setup-tools/kubeadm/ [1]: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm
In MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT
nirui·Feb 26, 2021
So based on the article, Autopilot is designed for GKE??? (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes...) I'm learning Kubernetes and is deploying my own test cluster on my ARM-based board at this very moment, and I already spend 3 days on K3s and have to give up due to a problem (https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/issues/2509#issuecomment-78657...). I must say, this is way way harder than Docker Swarm. Just want to know, will Google actually make Kubernetes a bit more friendlier for general non-GKE users?
In Google admits Kubernetes container tech is too complex
tyingq·Jan 22, 2021
The initial issue seems to be saying that it's because they need to have etcd anyway, so consolidating on that removes a dependency. Which fits their simplicity goal. Though the issue appears to have been created by a user, not a maintainer. "Since the HA direction needs etcd anyway.. I'm proposing dropping support for sqlite as the default embedded non-HA option and switch to embedded etcd as the default. This will reduce overall effort of maintainability of two entirely different datastores." https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/issues/845
In Rqlite: The lightweight, distributed relational database built on SQLite
aequitas·Jul 25, 2020
I finished setting up my Homelab Kubernetes setup this week. It's running two K3s[0] (a lightweight kubernetes) "clusters". One single node on a HP Microserver for media, storage, etc and one multi-node on Raspberry Pi's for IoT. For my homelab I don't need pretty autoscaling, so just a single node is enough. For the rpi's I'll probably try K3s HA cluster as they can be unreliable when the SD card eventually fails. Previously I used hand-crafted, Ansible, Salt, Puppet and Docker setups (that last one died two weeks ago prompting me to start the K3s setup). But they all ended up becomming snowflakes, making them to much hassle to maintain. What I like best about the K3s setup is that I can just flash K3OS[1] to a SD card with near zero configuration and just apply the Kubernetes resources (through Terraform in this case, but Helm is also
Read the rest
a great timesaver). I still have to figure out a nice way to do persistent storage. But for now since it's one node (the IoT cluster does not have state) the local-path Persistent Volumes work well enough. Might have a look into Rook. I will admit it's not trivial to get started with Kubernetes, but since I already needed to study it for work this provides me with a nice training ground. Alternatively Hashicorp offers nice solutions in this space as well with Consul and Nomad. But it needs a little bit more assembly, whereas K3s comes with batteries included (build in Traefik reverse proxy, load balancer and DNS). [0] https://github.com/rancher/k3s#what-is-this [1] https://github.com/rancher/k3os
In Ansible-Defined Homelab

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