I'm trying to understand why people are spinning up so many k8s clusters that they need a tool to do it for them?

I have one. And it's managed. I don't think there's significant cost savings to going unmanaged, but maybe. Even so, why would I need a ton of them?

I went RKE2, k3s is nice, but a little too minimal for my tastes. With a few hundred MB ram used, I've got an internal container registry, openbao for secrets, caddy for edge TLS, rabbitmq, and powerdns for exposing k8s ingress. Plus all the standard network policies, which while verbose, gets me nearly all the way there of traditional firewalls and networking.

I used this for a bit a few years ago but eventually needed something that was hard or impossible in k3sup and just went to using the k3s tools directly. My deployment script actually got simpler after removing k3sup.

Also, fun fact, k3sup is pronounced "ketchup" according to the README[0]

[0]: https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup/blob/master/README.md

You can pretty install it without ssh under 60s. The fun starts after it has been installed.

We have been running into lot of issues at production with k3s. There I embarked on journey to writing a kubernetes compliant and equivalent platform in rust with the help of claude [1]. It is a fun little project for now, still figuring out stuff, idea is to keep it minimal and single binary every embedded including CNI, and support various runtimes like docker, containerd etc but also wasm, vms and also jvm.

[1] https://github.com/debarshibasak/superkube

I can bootstrap an entire RKE2 VM (VM + RKE2 + join cluster) in like 5 mins with Salt (although I have no reason to think you couldn't do it with Ansible).

It's a cool project, but I didn't think the K3s part was the hard part.

What's the point? You can bootstrap k3s with "curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -". If you need to do that over ssh it works just fine. If you're doing it on multiple hosts, you should be using Ansible.

the best part of k8s is network, most of agentic systems presume no network , since it's a security concern, what are scenarios when you'd like to spin up k3sup?

I use official ‘ansible-playbook k3s.orchestration.site -i inventory.yml’ and it installs k3s over SSH and adds it into my kubectl context, all under 60s too.