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rough-farmer-49135

03/02/2023, 3:11 PM
A coworker is of the belief that RKE2 is not a full distribution of k8s because it's forked from k3s which aims for lighter weight & strips things out. It's my understanding the RKE2 add those back in and is full k8s with a few other things by default if you chose the default (like CNI & ingress controller installed). Can anyone confirm if I or my coworker is correct here?
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witty-jelly-95845

03/02/2023, 3:36 PM
RKE2 isn't forked from K3s. Have you seen https://www.suse.com/c/rancher_blog/when-to-use-k3s-and-rke2/ ?
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rough-farmer-49135

03/02/2023, 3:52 PM
I thought I remembered hearing that k3s was upstream from RKE2 from someone from Rancher on here, but it's a hazy memory. Thanks for the link
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agreeable-oil-87482

03/02/2023, 4:24 PM
Neither K3s or RKE2 are forks. They are distributions. They are also both fully conformant distributions as well. RKE2 and K3s share some architectural decisions, namely distribution as a single binary, support for a native
helmchart
kind, etc. However there are differences, for example, RKE2 being compiled with a FIPS-compliant compiler, k3s having support for ARM, etc. K3s largely achieves being more lightweight by removing depreciated in-tree cloud and storage providers (out of tree providers can, and should be leveraged), packaging a single binary enables shared caching, plus also allowing additional datastore backends other than etcd.
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clever-air-65544

03/02/2023, 11:17 PM
RKE2 does share some components but of course it's a CNCF certified distro
Your friend is also wrong anyway because k3s is also a certified distro 😄