K3s vs Docker: What I Learned Choosing Between Them for My Home Server
I run a handful of services on a single home server and recently had to actually decide between sticking with Docker Compose or moving to K3s for orchestration. This post is what I found out comparing the two, where each one makes sense, and which one I'd actually pick depending on the situation. They're Not Really Competing With Each Other Docker and K3s solve different layers of the same general problem, which is part of why comparing them gets confusing. Docker is a container runtime and packaging tool. It builds images, runs containers, and with Docker Compose it can coordinate a handful of containers on one machine. K3s is a certified Kubernetes distribution. It orchestrates containers across one or more nodes, and it still needs a container runtime underneath it, usually containerd, to actually run anything. For a single self-hosted server though, this distinction gets blurry fast. Docker Compose and a single-node K3s cluster end up solving the exact same real problem: r...