How's k3s doing these days? I'm not familiar with the area, but it was marketing itself as a simpler k8s.
K0s is a new project I like that is similar to k3s in spirit. Microk8s is a snap version from canonical with some neat out of the box stuff (like the simplest GPU support); but again, only available as a snap.
Honestly though just use kubespray for production, it's fine
Sure it helps with deploying a serviceable production cluster, but when you start throwing at it things like disaster recovery, the automation scripts can grow quite large and complex, even leveraging kubespray.
If you can, use a managed service like gks.
Imagine a 3 hour Ansible-playbook execution, which randomly failed on different tasks, most of which got fixed by hitting <up><enter> until it applied...
We switched to RKE, which runs even on our bigger clusters (nothing mad, maybe 40 nodes) in a few minutes and works perfectly..
We had much better luck just scripting kubeadm over ssh orchestration tooling.
k0s is better but also has a lot of bugs. it's the closest to vanilla kubernetes among all the distributions.
> like the simplest GPU support
linux users should be ready to install the nvidia device plugin. if they can't do that, they're never going to succeed in running a gpu accelerated application on their cluster anyway.
> like bootstrapping
in my experience, writing all the bootstrap scripts is painful. but now that there's chatgpt, so much of the drudgery as gone away.