I've been running k3s on my home server and it's been painless to set up compared to other options (e.g. kubeadm) while also being very lightweight. For single-

I've been running k3s on my home server and it's been painless to set up compared to other options (e.g. kubeadm) while also being very lightweight. For single-node setups, it defaults to Kine instead of etcd, using SQLite as the database. This removes a significant chunk of overhead for dev clusters and running in tiny devices. It also has Traefik set up with sane defaults, and the local path provisioner is also pretty good, too. But recently I've moved to Longhorn since I plan to eventually scale past 1 node. My only complaint about Longhorn is that applications that are write-heavy and delete old data (e.g. Prometheus with short retention) will require aggressive trimming (e.g. trim once a day) to keep the actual size of volumes down. Besides that, Longhorn makes backups to S3-compatible storage very effortless and you get RWX volumes, too! Regarding k3s itself, you can persist modifications to the way some components (e.g. Traefik) are installed through a HelmChartConfig CRD. This is what I personally use so I can use Traefik to route SSH traffic for Forgejo. Another nice thing is that although components like kube-proxy are baked in to the single k3s binary, you can still scrape metrics with Prometheus provided that you expose their endpoints somewhere on your cluster network.