Rui CarmoThe container orchestration landscape is currently dominated by Kubernetes (k8s), which has become the de facto standard for managing containerized applications at scale. While powerful, Kubernetes can be complex to set up and manage, leading many to explore lighter alternatives like K3s for smaller deployments or edge computing.
However, one of the things that has kept me from using it is that (for now) kubevirt does not provide as much control over VMs as I would like (starting with things like memory ballooning), and I still run a few workloads in VMs.
I mostly use Docker Swarm for personal projects because it’s just less maintenance and cognitive overhead, but since I spend so much time working with k8s professionally, I am keeping a list of resources for a possible future transition.
Resources
| Category | Date | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Authentication | 2020 | external-auth-server | an authentication server that supports OpenID Connect |
| Control Plane | 2022 | krustlet | Kubernetes Kubelet in Rust for running WASM |
| 2023 | microshift | A small form factor OpenShift/Kubernetes optimized for edge computing |
|
| Edge | 2022 | akri | extends the device plugin framework to support various hardware devices |
| Networking | 2020 | danm | Nokia’s “Damn, Another Network Manager!”, quite aptly named |
| 2021 | multus | a CNI plugin that can provide multiple network interfaces to pods (also a bit of a nightmare solution, sadly typical in modern 5G core deployments) |
|
| Operating System | 2025 | talos | a modern OS designed for running Kubernetes clusters securely and reliably |
| Paas | 2023 | kubero | a Heroku-like PaaS for K8s |
| Storage | longhorn | a distributed block storage system for Kubernetes |
|
| 2025 | synology-csi | a CSI driver for Synology NAS devices |
|
| Tools | 2023 | k9s | a TUI tool for managing clusters and deployments |
| systemk | a systemd backend for the virtual-kubelet that allows for creating pods as systemd units |
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| 2025 | kubetail | real-time logging dashboard |
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| kubestatus-operator | a Kubernetes operator that provides a status page |
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| Virtualization | 2020 | Orka | Orchestration of Mac VMs using Kubernetes |