Day 73: Lab: K3s on a small VM

Lab: stand up K3s yourself

Installing K3s on a small VM (one command)

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
sudo cat /etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml   # kubeconfig
sudo k3s kubectl get nodes

Deploy your Phase 8 stack via Helm on real K3s

Package your Phase 8 manifests (or a subset) as a Helm chart, install it onto this K3s VM with helm install, confirm it comes up correctly, then practice helm upgrade (bump an image tag) and helm rollback (revert it) — this is the same muscle memory you'll need constantly once GitOps (Phase 13) automates the "upgrade" half of this loop.

Phase 12 complete — you should now be able to

Stand up a working K3s cluster from a single install command
Package a real application as a Helm chart with a values.yaml
Upgrade and roll back a Helm release
Explain when you'd reach for K3s, RKE2, vanilla, or managed Kubernetes

Why is K3s a good choice specifically for this lab, rather than a full vanilla kubeadm cluster?

Day 73: Lab: K3s on a small VM

Lab: stand up K3s yourself

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