Monday, July 5, 2021

Microk8s - minor anoyance

I've been working with Microk8s for a little while now and it generally works well. There is one area where it seems to fall short though - and that is in the area of configuration flexibility. 

I've been starting to work with other tools such as Podman, Buildah, Docker and rootless mode.  I've also been investigating various OCI & CRI runtimes - crun, runc, containerd, cri-o.  As part of that, I want to try the various configurations to see the differences myself.  

Kubernetes deprecated Docker as the runtime for versions 1.21+ and will use CRI in the form of containerd.  This is fine but I would also like to work with crun to determine if there are benefits for some use cases.  Most information I've run across indicates that crun requires less memory and tends to support new features first.  In the use case where I would like to run a good number of services on either a single node cluster or very small cluster as part of some research - crun might provide some benefits.  At the moment, It doesn't seem like configuring Microk8s with crun is an option.  Since OCI and CRI tend to promote the fact that alternative runtimes are supported - I'm somewhat surprised that configuring alternatives in Microk8s is either not supported or possibly just difficult.

I've not found a lot of good/detailed "how-to" articles regarding alternative configuration of many of the container/runtime related technologies. Regardless, I found this post indicating Microk8s lacks the ability to handle alternative setups but the post is old enough that something could have changed or at least the underlying reason may have.

This is a good reason to review other options at least.  I'd rather be able to decide certain tradeoffs based on my needs rather than not have the option. With all the flexibility that K8S provides in general, it seems unfortunate that individual "flavors" may limit configurations. I can see defaulting to some specific configurations - that provides a way to reduce initial complexity but removing/invalidating some configurations seems a bit too "embrace and extend" and/or "Either accept the propriety platform or don't use it" attitudish. I'm hoping I am wrong and can eventually find a way to test out some other configurations of interest.


This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ.


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