K3sup – bootstrap K3s over SSH in < 60s (opens in new tab)

This is a scam. Bootstrapping k3s is extremely easy. This tool lies to you giving you the impression that it's difficult or that you need a script, and tries to sell you monthly pro subscription, the features of which are also completely trivial.

I went RKE2, k3s is nice, but a little too minimal for my tastes. With a few hundred MB ram used, I've got an internal container registry, openbao for secrets, caddy for edge TLS, rabbitmq, and powerdns for exposing k8s ingress. Plus all the standard network policies, which while verbose, gets me nearly all the way there of traditional firewalls and networking.

I'm trying to understand why people are spinning up so many k8s clusters that they need a tool to do it for them?

I have one. And it's managed. I don't think there's significant cost savings to going unmanaged, but maybe. Even so, why would I need a ton of them?

I do think the Talos model has kinda superseded this when it comes to repeatable deployment tbh

used to use this but have opted to do good ol' hand-rolled deployment scripts instead you will run into some niche usecase that k3sup can't express and end up having to do a post script anyway.

K3s is so easy to install, that k3sup feels like an increase in complexity. Feels like an abstraction that provides negative value.

I used this for a bit a few years ago but eventually needed something that was hard or impossible in k3sup and just went to using the k3s tools directly. My deployment script actually got simpler after removing k3sup.

Also, fun fact, k3sup is pronounced "ketchup" according to the README[0]

[0]: https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup/blob/master/README.md

Talos is all you need.

What's the point? You can bootstrap k3s with "curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -". If you need to do that over ssh it works just fine. If you're doing it on multiple hosts, you should be using Ansible.

I can bootstrap an entire RKE2 VM (VM + RKE2 + join cluster) in like 5 mins with Salt (although I have no reason to think you couldn't do it with Ansible).

It's a cool project, but I didn't think the K3s part was the hard part.

You can pretty install it without ssh under 60s. The fun starts after it has been installed.

We have been running into lot of issues at production with k3s. There I embarked on journey to writing a kubernetes compliant and equivalent platform in rust with the help of claude [1]. It is a fun little project for now, still figuring out stuff, idea is to keep it minimal and single binary every embedded including CNI, and support various runtimes like docker, containerd etc but also wasm, vms and also jvm.

[1] https://github.com/debarshibasak/superkube

the best part of k8s is network, most of agentic systems presume no network , since it's a security concern, what are scenarios when you'd like to spin up k3sup?

I use official ‘ansible-playbook k3s.orchestration.site -i inventory.yml’ and it installs k3s over SSH and adds it into my kubectl context, all under 60s too.