In my experience the memory usage from the underlying process are pretty negligible, and then you also need the controller/scheduler pods running. It doesn't u

In my experience the memory usage from the underlying process are pretty negligible, and then you also need the controller/scheduler pods running. It doesn't use a ton, but in order of least-to-most lightweight IME it's Minikube -> Microk8s -> k3s But again, the overhead is marginal so it's not a world of difference. If you can run Swarm you can definitely run one of the lightweight k8s distributions.