> What does it mean that k3s is “certified”? Should I care? What’s the tradeoff? I think that maybe I should have linked directly to the K3s GitHub, which goes

> What does it mean that k3s is “certified”? Should I care? What’s the tradeoff? I think that maybe I should have linked directly to the K3s GitHub, which goes into detail about what it is, what the components are, as well as links to more information about testing: https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/ https://github.com/k3s-io/k3s/ Kubernetes is a large and complex system, but doing end to end tests aims to ensure that various implementations work correctly, they have pretty in depth docs on all of this, including conformance tests in particular: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contributors/devel/sig-testing/e2e-tests.md https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contribu... So, if a distribution passes all of these, then it's likely that it will give you fewer unpleasant surprises. Here's a list: https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/ https://www.cncf.io/certification/software-conformance/ > When you mentioned Traefik my eyes glazed over. Well, you typically do need an ingress controller that will allow exposing services to the outside and direct network traffic. Traefik is liked by some, less so by others, but generally works okay - except that its documentation (for K3s in particular) isn't as abundant as it would be when using Nginx. For example, if you want to use a custom SSL/TLS certificate (without ACME) for all domains by default, figuring that out might take a while. That said, if you don't like it, technically you could swap it for something else, however I personally had a cluster hang once while doing that due to some cleanup action getting stuck. There are plenty of options: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingress-controllers/ https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/ingr... > Is there a picture of how all this fits together? One not created by a consultant selling their services? I actually found their diagrams to be surprisingly sane: https://docs.k3s.io/architecture https://docs.k3s.io/architecture However, do be warned that there are many different ways how to build clusters that might have significant differences. K3s is just one of the Kubernetes distros - that attempt to provide an opinionated view on how to mix and match the components out there to end up with something that will let you use Kubernetes and have things actually work as expected at the end of the day. A bit like how we have OS distros like Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL and so on.