Lightweight Kubernetes Distributions: A Performance Comparison of MicroK8s, k3s, k0s, and Microshift

Abstract

With containers becoming a prevalent method of software deployment, there is an increasing interest to use container orchestration frameworks not only in data centers, but also on resource-constrained hardware, such as Internet-of-Things devices, Edge gateways, or developer workstations. Consequently, software vendors have released several lightweight Kubernetes (K8s) distributions for container orchestration in the last few years, but it remains difficult for software developers to select an appropriate solution. Existing studies on lightweight K8s distribution performance tested only small workloads, showed inconclusive results, and did not cover recently released distributions. The contribution of this paper is a comparison of MicroK8s, k3s, k0s, and MicroShift, investigating their minimal resource usage as well as control plane and data plane performance in stress scenarios. While k3s and k0s showed by a small amount the highest control plane throughput and MicroShift showed the highest data plane throughput, usability, security, and maintainability are additional factors that drive the decision for an appropriate distribution.