k3s is not a fork of Kubernetes or a stripped-down imitation — it is a CNCF-certified, fully conformant Kubernetes distribution that happens to ship as a single sub-70MB binary and run the control plane in a few hundred megabytes of RAM. So 'k3s vs k8s' is really a packaging and operations question, not an API question: your manifests and Helm charts run unchanged on both. This post breaks down what k3s actually changes (the kine datastore shim, SQLite instead of etcd by default, bundled batteries like Traefik and ServiceLB, removed legacy in-tree drivers), the real resource and operational differences, high-availability options, where each one wins, and where k3s's conveniences can surprise you.
Kubernetes
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k3s vs k8s: Lightweight Kubernetes or the Full Thing? -
Knative: Serverless on Your Own Cluster Knative brings the Cloud Run experience to any Kubernetes cluster: request-driven scale-to-zero via the Knative Pod Autoscaler, revision-based traffic splitting for blue-green and canary deployments, and a full CloudEvents-native eventing layer with brokers and triggers. This post covers the architecture in depth, the data path through the activator during cold start, and an honest comparison with KEDA and plain HPA — including when Knative's operational weight makes it the wrong choice.
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KubeVirt: Running VMs on Kubernetes KubeVirt makes virtual machines first-class Kubernetes objects: each VM becomes a CRD, runs inside a virt-launcher pod backed by libvirt and QEMU, and is managed with kubectl like any other workload. This post covers the architecture, the VirtualMachine and VMI CRDs, live migration, CDI disk import, Multus and SR-IOV networking, and the honest question of when running VMs on Kubernetes actually makes sense versus a dedicated hypervisor.
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Kyverno vs OPA Gatekeeper A deep look at the two dominant Kubernetes policy engines: Kyverno's YAML-native approach with validate, mutate, generate, and image-verification capabilities versus Gatekeeper's Rego-powered ConstraintTemplate model and its reach beyond Kubernetes — plus an honest reckoning with whether Kubernetes' built-in CEL admission policies are making both redundant.
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Rook: Ceph as a Kubernetes Operator Rook turns Ceph into a Kubernetes-native workload: it deploys and reconciles monitors, OSDs, and managers as pods, exposes block, filesystem, and object storage through a handful of CRDs, and handles day-2 operations — scaling, upgrades, failure recovery — through the operator loop. This post covers the full architecture, the key CRDs with YAML, StorageClass patterns for RBD and CephFS, external-cluster mode, and an honest verdict on when Rook-Ceph is the right tool versus when Longhorn or cloud-native block storage is the better answer.
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Velero: Backup and DR for Kubernetes The honest operator's guide to Velero: what it actually backs up (API objects and persistent volume data), how CSI snapshot integration and the Kopia-powered built-in DataMover work together, how to schedule backups and scope them by namespace or label, and why your DR plan is fiction until you have tested a restore end to end.
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Kubernetes Network Policies in Depth: The Complete Guide A comprehensive deep-dive into Kubernetes NetworkPolicy: the ingress/egress model, default-deny patterns, the DNS gap, namespace selectors, Cilium L7/FQDN policies, AdminNetworkPolicy, and debugging blocked traffic.
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Open Policy Agent and Gatekeeper: Policy as Code for Kubernetes and Beyond A deep dive into OPA, Rego, and Gatekeeper — covering admission webhooks, ConstraintTemplates, external data providers, mutations, conftest testing, and policy-as-code patterns beyond Kubernetes.
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Gateway API: The Future of Kubernetes Ingress The Kubernetes Gateway API replaces Ingress with a role-oriented, expressive API for HTTP routing, traffic splitting, header manipulation, and TCP/gRPC routing. Here's everything you need to migrate.
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Karpenter: Intelligent Node Autoscaling for Kubernetes How Karpenter outperforms Cluster Autoscaler with just-in-time node provisioning, flexible NodePool configuration, spot instance handling, bin-packing, and intelligent cost optimization strategies.