k3s vs Flux CD

Overview

k3s

Stacks97

Followers252

Votes16

Flux CD

Stacks81

Followers76

Votes1

GitHub Stars6.9K

Forks1.1K

k3s vs Flux CD: What are the differences?

Developers describe k3s as "Lightweight Kubernetes. 5 less than k8s (by Rancher Labs)". Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server. On the other hand, Flux CD is detailed as "The GitOps operator for Kubernetes". It is a tool that automatically ensures that the state of your Kubernetes cluster matches the configuration you’ve supplied in Git. It uses an operator in the cluster to trigger deployments inside Kubernetes, which means that you don’t need a separate continuous delivery tool.

k3s and Flux CD can be primarily classified as "Container" tools.

Some of the features offered by k3s are:

ARM64 and ARMv7 support
Simplified installation
SQLite3 support

On the other hand, Flux CD provides the following key features:

Describe the entire desired state of your system in Git. This includes apps, configuration, dashboards, monitoring, and everything else
Use YAML to enforce conformance to the declared system. You don’t need to run kubectl because all changes go through Git. Use diffing tools to detect divergence between observed and desired state and receive notifications
Everything is controlled through pull requests, which means no learning curve for new developers. Just use your standard PR process. Your Git history provides a sequence of transactions, allowing you to recover system state from any snapshot. Fix a production issue via pull request rather than making changes to the running system

k3s is an open source tool with 12.5K GitHub stars and 913 GitHub forks. Here's a link to k3s's open source repository on GitHub.

🔥 Trending in Container Registry on StackShare

SpinKube Container Registry

Hyper-efficient serverless on Kubernetes, powered by WebAssembly

Try it View Docs Alternatives

Try

0

6

Detailed Comparison

k3s	Flux CD
Certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads in unattended, resource-constrained, remote locations or inside IoT appliances. Supports something as small as a Raspberry Pi or as large as an AWS a1.4xlarge 32GiB server.	It is a tool that automatically ensures that the state of your Kubernetes cluster matches the configuration you’ve supplied in Git. It uses an operator in the cluster to trigger deployments inside Kubernetes, which means that you don’t need a separate continuous delivery tool.
ARM64 and ARMv7 support; Simplified installation; SQLite3 support; etcd support; Automatic Manifest and Helm Chart management; containerd, CoreDNS, Flannel support	Describe the entire desired state of your system in Git. This includes apps, configuration, dashboards, monitoring, and everything else; Use YAML to enforce conformance to the declared system. You don’t need to run kubectl because all changes go through Git. Use diffing tools to detect divergence between observed and desired state and receive notifications; Everything is controlled through pull requests, which means no learning curve for new developers. Just use your standard PR process. Your Git history provides a sequence of transactions, allowing you to recover system state from any snapshot. Fix a production issue via pull request rather than making changes to the running system
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 6.9K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 97	Stacks 81
Followers 252	Followers 76
Votes 16	Votes 1
Pros & Cons
Pros 6 Lightweight 4 Easy 2 Scale Services 2 Open Source 2 Replication Controller	Pros 1 Open Source
Integrations
Kubernetes SQLite	Git Kubernetes YAML

What are some alternatives to k3s, Flux CD?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Codefresh

Automate and parallelize testing. Codefresh allows teams to spin up on-demand compositions to run unit and integration tests as part of the continuous integration process. Jenkins integration allows more complex pipelines.

CAST.AI

It is an AI-driven cloud optimization platform for Kubernetes. Instantly cut your cloud bill, prevent downtime, and 10X the power of DevOps.

Flocker

Flocker is a data volume manager and multi-host Docker cluster management tool. With it you can control your data using the same tools you use for your stateless applications. This means that you can run your databases, queues and key-value stores in Docker and move them around as easily as the rest of your app.