There are a lot of reasons why you might want to have your personal Kubernetes cluster. Personally, I like building my own tools and getting a better grasp of what happens under the hood, but you might want to experiment with Kubernetes for different reasons but are held back by the big cost of using Kubernetes services provided by AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, etc.

K3s is a lightweight distribution of Kubernetes created at Rancher Labs. Basically, it is a complete Kubernetes distribution, but they combined all processes into a single binary, added cross-compilation for ARM, dropped a lot of extra bells and whistles that you don’t normally use and bundled some extra user-space tools.

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can setup a complete k3s cluster which is completely compatible with upstream Kubernetes and has added functionality for simple deployment on Virtual Machines. After going through this tutorial, you can deploy any Kubernetes applications onto your cluster and leverage the automatic storage provisioning and software load balancer which can normally only be found in managed Kubernetes services.

#kubernetes #cloud-computing #cloud-services #kubernetes-cluster #cloud-native