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?

RKE2 isn't forked from K3s. Have you seen https://www.suse.com/c/rancher_blog/when-to-use-k3s-and-rke2/ ?

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

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.

RKE2 does share some components but of course it's a CNCF certified distro