Not rude at all. The benefit is a much simpler model where you simply connect machines in a network where every machine is equal. You can add more, remove some. No need to worry about an HA 3-node centralised “cluster brain”. There isn’t one.

It’s a similar experience when a cloud provider manages the control plane for you. But you have to worry about the availability when you host everything yourself. Losing etcd quorum results in an unusable cluster.

Many people want to avoid this, especially when running at a smaller scale like a handful of machines.

The cluster network can even partition and each partition continues to operate allowing to deploy/update apps individually.

That’s essentially what we all did in a pre-k8s era with chef and ansible but without the boilerplate and reinventing the wheel, and using the learnings from k8s and friends.

If you are a small operation and trying to self host k3s or k8s or any number of out of the box installations that are probably at least as complex as docker compose swarms, for any non trivial production case, presents similar problems in monitoring and availability as ones you’d get with off the shelf cloud provider managed services, except the managed solutions come without the pain in the ass. Except you don’t have a control plane.

I have managed custom server clusters in a self hosted situation. the problems are hard, but if you’re small, why would you reach for such a solution in the first place? you’d be better off paying for a managed service. What situation forces so many people to reach to self hosted kubernetes?

k3s uses sqlite, so not etcd.