Kubernetes in Edge and Cloud Computing: A Comparative Study of K3s, K0s, MicroK8s, and K8s

The increasing use of containerized applications characterizes the modern era. These applications are executed within isolated packages of code, known as containers, which include libraries, binaries, configuration files, and all necessary components to run the application on any operating system, packaged into a lightweight executable file. The use of containerized applications is growing exponentially, creating a need for more efficient, scalable, and secure management of these applications. The solution to this issue was provided by Kubernetes, an opensource technology initially developed by Google and later adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications and has become the de-facto container orchestration framework in cloud-native environments due to its robust architecture, flexibility, and extensive ecosystem of available tools. Moreover, thanks to its extensible API Kubernetes can easily integrate security solutions. This work focuses on comparing the resource consumption and performance of four Kubernetes distributions, namely K3s, K0s, MicroK8s and K8s. The comparison results highlight that K3s and MicroK8s are suitable for lightweight deployments and resource-constrained environments, K0s is ideal for single-node environments and K8s is well suited for large-scale environments.