Why We Chose K3s to Power Our Kubernetes Service

I often see the claim that K3S is much more "lightweight" than upstream K8S. Is this difference really that significant in practice?

I just bootstrapped K3S and kubeadm single node clusters to compare.

k3s-master Ready master 24m v1.17.3+k3s1 10.10.10.64 <none> Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS 4.15.0-88-generic containerd://1.3.3-k3s1

kubeadm-master Ready master 17m v1.17.4 10.10.10.21 <none> Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS 4.15.0-88-generic containerd://1.2.13

root@k3s-master:~# k top nodes

NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%

k3s-master 43m 2% 643Mi 16%

root@kubeadm-master:~# k top nodes

NAME CPU(cores) CPU% MEMORY(bytes) MEMORY%

kubeadm-master 65m 3% 769Mi 20%