MICROK8S

K3S

MINIKUBE

CNCF certified

Yes

Yes

Yes

Vanilla Kubernetes

Yes

–

Yes

Architecture support

x86, ARM64, s390x

x86, ARM64, ARMhf

x86, ARM64, ARMv7, ppc64, s390x

Enterprise support

Yes

Yes

–

Single-node support

Yes

Yes

Yes

Multi-node cluster support

Yes

Yes

–

Automatic high availability

Yes

–

–

Automatic updates

Yes

–

–

Memory requirements

540 MB

512 MB

2 GB

Add-on functionality

Yes

–

Yes

Container runtime

containerd, kata

CRI-O

Docker, containerd, CRI-O

Networking

Calico, Cilium, CoreDNS, Traefik, NGINX, Ambassador, Multus, MetalLB

Flannel, CoreDNS, Traefik, Canal, Klipper

Calico, Cilium, Flannel, ingress, DNS, Kindnet

Storage

Hostpath storage, OpenEBS, Ceph

Hostpath storage, Longhorn

Hostpath storage

GPU acceleration

Yes

–

Yes

Feature

k0s

k3s

microk8s

Licensing

Completely Open Source

Completely Open Source

Completely Open Source

Packaging

k0s is distributed as a single binary with minimal host OS dependencies besides the host OS kernel

Packaged as a single binary.

MicroK8s is a Kubernetes cluster delivered as a single snap package.

Kubernetes Versions

v1.20 and v1.21

Latest release updates Kubernetes to v1.22.1

Kubernetes v1.22, v1.21

Container Runtime

ContainerD (default)

ContainerD (default)

ContainerD is the container runtime used by MicroK8s

Supported Host OS

Linux (kernel v3.10 or newer)          Windows Server 2019 (experimental)

K3s is expected to work on most modern Linux systems

Windows 10, Linux, macOS

Control Plane Storage Options

In-Cluster Elastic Etcd with TLS (default), In-Cluster SQLite (default for single node), External PostgreSQL, External MySQL

sqlite3 is the default storage mechanism. etcd3, MySQL, Postgres also still available

MicroK8s supports high availability using Dqlite as the datastore for cluster state.

Built-In Security Features

RBAC, Support OpenID Providers, Pod Security Policies, Network Policies, Micro VM Runtimes (coming soon), Control Plane Isolation

Secure by default with reasonable defaults for lightweight environments

Secure by default with reasonable defaults for lightweight environments

Supported CNI Providers

Kube-Router (default), Calico or Custom

K3s will run with flannel by default as the CNI, using VXLAN as the default backend. Custom supported as well

Flanneld runs if ha-cluster is not enabled. If ha-cluster is enabled, calico is run instead.

Supported Machine Architectures

x86-64, ARM64, ARMv7

Latest release supports x86_64, ARMv7, and ARM64

x86_64, ARMv7, and ARM64

Backing Company

Mirantis

Rancher

Canonical

Addons

Minimum Addons

Traefik, Helm,LB

Dashboard, Ingress, DNS, and more