k3s is absolutely production ready. It's intended for IOT and edge devices, but if you want to use it in a data center, it'll work. What you lose is the failove

k3s is absolutely production ready. It's intended for IOT and edge devices, but if you want to use it in a data center, it'll work. What you lose is the failover of Kubernetes itself that you get from a proper HA etcd setup where the control plane for your cluster is itself also clustered, but you really don't need that if your entire application is a single node anyway.