Is microk8s suitable for production environments, or is it just for development?

microk8s appears to be an easy way to install Kubernetes on Ubuntu. Several places refer to it as an alternative to minikube, which is not aimed at production environments, and this post seems to indicate that it's mostly aimed at development environments. However, I don't see a reason why it's not suitable for production environments.

I have two Ubuntu servers and want to install Kubernetes on each while maintaining the legacy applications that also run on these servers. I'm wondering if microk8s is a good choice for this scenario.

Is microk8s suitable for production environments, or is it just for development?

Solution 1:

just to update to 2020 - This is from canonical:

What is MicroK8s? MicroK8s is a powerful, lightweight, reliable production-ready Kubernetes distribution. It is an enterprise grade Kubernetes distribution that has a small disk and memory footprint while offering production grade add-ons out-the-box such as Istio, Knative, Grafana, Cilium and more. Whether you are running a production environment or interested in exploring K8s, MicroK8s serves your needs.

So I think it's pretty clear.

https://ubuntu.com/blog/introduction-to-microk8s-part-1-2

Solution 2:

(full disclosure, I'm a product manager at Canonical, the creators of MicroK8s)

MicroK8s can be used for production. Of course, production requirements vary, so the real answer is "it depends".

If you have a production use case for MicroK8s but find it lacking a feature that is a must have, please let us know. You can do that by filing an issue in the github project - https://github.com/ubuntu/microk8s.