ugh it's great that k3s exists, but frustrating that kube can't hit this target on its own

it seems like small clusters are not economical with vanilla kube. (I say this having frequently tried and failed to do this, but not having done napkin math on system pod budgets to prove it to myself generally). and this gets worse once you try to install any kind of plugins or monitoring tools.

I really wonder if there's a hole in the market for 'manage 5-10 containers with ingress on one or two smallish nodes'. Or if there's a hard core of users of alternatives like swarm mode. this guy https://mrkaran.dev/posts/home-server-nomad/ evolved his home lab from kube to nomad to terraformed pure docker over 3 years.

It'd be a whole lot easier to hit this goal without needing a minimum of 3 nodes for Etcd quorum.

I'd love to see K8s get K3s' support for using an external MySQL, Postgres, or SQLite instead of Etcd.

from this https://github.com/k3s-io/kine it seems like k3s was born out of a rancher labs project called 'kine' that does what you're describing?