Having played around with the managed Kubernetes offerings of various cloud players (DO, AWS, GCP), I was wondering if it was possible to do this cheap. My site doesn’t have much traffic or anything complicated really, so running it off a $5 DO droplet is reasonable. Sadly managed Kubernetes offerings won’t come out so cheap. (Sure I could leech off the starting $300 GCP credit for a year then keep hopping accounts, but…)

Then I read about k3s. The people behind Rancher made it as a lightweight (but functionally complete) Kubernetes distro. Lightweight, they say… Just how light? (Imagine a weird maniac light in my eyes here.) Could I run it on a $5 droplet?