MicroK8s: The Cloud-Native Sandbox
MicroK8s, developed by Canonical, is a high-performance, cloud-native, open-source Kubernetes distribution engineered for reliability. It’s designed to run fast, self-healing, and highly available Kubernetes clusters while effectively abstracting many of the underlying complexities. Running Kubernetes with minimal operational burden on nearly any platform, is the core philosophy behind MicroK8s.
MicroK8s is highly optimized to provide a lightweight installation for both single-node and multi-node clusters across a vast range of operating systems. This is what makes it a good choice for different use cases, for example: local development, edge computing, and cloud integration.
Indeed, Canonical's MicroK8s is a CNCF-certified, upstream Kubernetes distribution designed to run efficiently across a wide range of environments, from local development machines to CI/CD pipelines, edge and small production clusters.
It supports multiple architectures, including x86, ARM64, s390x, and POWER9, and provides enterprise support through Canonical.
MicroK8s can run as a single-node cluster or scale to multi-node setups with built-in automatic high availability, while keeping resource usage low, with a minimal memory footprint of around 540 MB.
It uses containerd by default and supports Kata Containers for enhanced isolation, offers automatic updates via snap packages, and includes a rich add-on system for enabling networking, storage, and observability features on demand.
Networking options include Calico, Cilium, CoreDNS, Traefik, NGINX, Ambassador, Multus, and MetalLB, while storage can be backed by HostPath, OpenEBS, or Ceph. MicroK8s also supports GPU acceleration.
All of these features make MicroK8s suitable for compute-intensive workloads alongside standard Kubernetes applications.
k3s: The Lightweight Kubernetes Distribution
K3s was developed by Rancher Labs (now part of SUSE) as a lightweight, easy-to-install Kubernetes distribution optimized for resource-constrained environments such as edge computing and IoT devices.
It's a CNCF-certified kubernetes distribution that is known for its simplicity and efficiency. It supports x86, ARM64, and ARMhf architectures and comes with enterprise support through Rancher and SUSE.
k3s can run as a single-node cluster or scale to multi-node deployments with built-in automatic high availability, while maintaining a low memory footprint of around 512 MB. It packages core Kubernetes components into a streamlined distribution, which removes the need for separate add-on management and enables automatic updates out of the box.
k3s supports containerd and CRI-O as container runtimes, provides networking through Flannel, CoreDNS, Traefik, Canal, and Klipper, and offers default storage options such as HostPath and Longhorn.
GPU acceleration is also supported.
Tools like K3d, which allows running k3s clusters inside Docker containers, and Rancher Manager, which provides a user-friendly interface for managing multiple k3s clusters, can further enhance the k3s experience.
Like MicroK8s, k3s is suitable for running both standard Kubernetes applications, compute-intensive workloads, and edge computing scenarios.
When to Choose MicroK8s vs k3s
Both MicroK8s and k3s are excellent choices and clearly share many similarities, but there are some differences that may influence your decision.
For example, when it comes to ARM32 support, MicroK8s, while it works well on AMD64 and ARM64 environments, it does not support ARM32 architectures, which k3s does. MicroK8s is not a good fit for ARM32. While it supports ARM64 and other architectures, MicroK8s relies on snap packages, which are effectively unsupported or unreliable on ARM32 for Kubernetes workloads. In practice, MicroK8s targets ARM64, not 32-bit ARM, and running it on ARM32 is either unsupported or impractical. Therefore, k3s may be preferred when running Kubernetes in extremely resource-constrained environments.
k3s removes some non-essential components of upstream Kubernetes and uses lightweight defaults, such as SQLite as the embedded datastore, to significantly reduce the overall footprint of the distribution. It can also use external datastores like MySQL or PostgreSQL for larger deployments.
One of its notable features is the auto-deployment of manifests, where k3s watches a predefined directory for Kubernetes YAML files and automatically applies changes without additional user interaction. k3s continuously watches a predefined directory (for example, /var/lib/rancher/k3s/server/manifests) and automatically applies any Kubernetes YAML placed there. This behavior is part of k3s itself and works out of the box.
MicroK8s, by contrast, follows a more explicit and operator-driven model. It does not watch a directory for manifests or auto-apply changes. Resources are applied manually using microk8s kubectl apply, or through higher-level tooling such as Helm, GitOps controllers (Argo CD, Flux), or CI pipelines. This design aligns with MicroK8s’ goal of staying close to upstream Kubernetes behavior and avoiding implicit automation.
Some of the differences between MicroK8s and k3s are a result of their differing philosophies. MicroK8s aims to provide a full-featured Kubernetes experience that closely mirrors upstream vanilla Kubernetes, while k3s focuses on minimalism and efficiency, skipping and sometimes replacing components to achieve a smaller footprint.
K3s vs MicroK8s: The Verdict
Choose MicroK8s when:
- You want a Kubernetes experience that stays very close to upstream vanilla Kubernetes and you are running on AMD64 or ARM64 systems.
- You prefer a modular add-on system to enable features as needed.
- You want enterprise support from Canonical.
- You are already using snap packages and the Ubuntu/Canonical ecosystem.
Choose k3s when:
- You need support for ARM32 architectures or extremely resource-constrained environments.
- You prefer a more streamlined, all-in-one Kubernetes distribution with fewer components.
- You want automatic manifest deployment out of the box.
- You want enterprise support from Rancher/SUSE.
- You are already using Rancher Manager, Fleet, Longhorn, or other Rancher ecosystem tools.
What's Next?
If you want to master Kubernetes the way it runs in real-world environments, check out End-to-End Kubernetes with Rancher, RKE2, K3s, Fleet, Longhorn, and NeuVector - a hands-on course that takes you from cluster creation to security, storage, networking and multi-cluster management, using the same tools used in production platforms.
