I currently have a k3s cluster setup (I followed a video from Jim's garage). Its installed on 3 mini pcs 2x 5700u(16 core 64gig ram) and 1 n100(4 core 32 gig ram). I mainly wanted HA for services like pihole, traefik like vaultwarden that I don't to want go down, I have longhorn running for HA.

After watching a recent video on Talos I am wondering if that would be a better fit. I saw a post from the makers of Talos comparing the resource use on a pi4 with Talso vs k3s and k3s used about half the energy of the Talso at around 5% idle vs 9% cpu usage with Talos at idle.

The only thing about these results are they are from 2021 so they could have improved the resource efficiency.

Obviously I am following youtube videos so I am not super experienced with kubernetes. What is the the best choice?

Hello community.

I have 5 HP Mini G4s i5 8500t lying around with 32GB RAM each, running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and I've been building a k3s cluster on them. (3 cp+ 2 workers).

For persistent storage, I already have TrueNAS set up with NFS. On the cluster I plan on hosting Immich, NextCloud, Forgejo, Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, n8n, Backstage, some Postgres, FreshRSS, and a WordPress dev environment.
Jellyfin, I'm keeping it directly on TrueNAS since it has an Intel Arc A380 and direct GPU access for transcoding just makes more sense there - at least I think so , though I have looked into FFmpeg remote transcoding.

I'm going with Gateway API for ingress, Cilium as CNI, and Grafana + Prometheus for observability.

For remote access, I plan on using CloudFlare tunnels(for exposing some apps to the internet like Jellyfin, Immich, NextCloud) and also have Twingate for home lab remote access.

I've been looking at Talos Linux since the immutable OS model is appealing — no SSH, no package management, less stuff to maintain.

Has anyone here switched from k3s to Talos, or run both?

Thanks for your time :)

Hi there,

I‘m reaching out as I want to know about your experience with different K8s.

Kontext: We’re currently using Tanzu and have only problems with it. No update went just smooth, for a long time only EOL k8s versions available and the support is friendly said a joke. With the last case we lost the rest of our trust. We had a P2 because of a production cluster down due to the update. It took more than TWO!!! months to get the problem solved so that the cluster is updated to (the inbetween outdated) new k8s version. And even if the cluster is upgraded it seems like the root cause is still not figured out. What is really a problem as we still have to upgrade one cluster which runs most of our production workload and can’t be sure if it will work out or not.

We’re now planning to get rid of it and evaluate some alternatives. That’s where your experience should come in. On our shortlist are currently:

• Thalos

• k3s

• Rancher

• Open Nebula with OneKE

• Kubermatic (haven’t intensively checked the different options yet)

We’re running our stuff in an on premise data center currently with vsphere. That also will probably stay as my team, opposite to Tanzu, has not the owner ship here. That’s why I’m for example not sure, if Open Nebula would be overkill as it would be rather a vsphere replacement than just Tanzu. What do you think?

And how are your experiences with the other platforms? Important factors would be:

• stability

• as less complexity is necessary

• difficulty of setup, management, etc.

• how good is the support of there is one

• is there an active community to get help with issues

• If not running bare metal, is it possible to spin up nodes automatically in VMWare (could not really find something in the documentation.

Of course a lot of other stuff like backup/restore, etc. but that’s something I can figure out via documentation.

Thank’s in advance for sharing your experience.