I ran K3S locally during the pandemic and the only issue at the time was getting PV/PVC provisioned cleanly, I think Longhorn was just reaching maturity and five years ago the docs were pretty sparse. But yeah k3s is a dream to work with in 2025 the docs are great and as long as you stay on the happy path and your network is setup it's about as effortless as cluster computing can get.
I've been running one for a couple years now, and even in that short of time Longhorn has made huge leaps in maturity. It was/is definitely the weakest link.
Cost wise it's a no brainer. Three servers with 64 GB ECC and 6 cores for the price of three M5 larges. So 192 GB and 18 cores for the price of 24GB and 6 cores.
I think one of reason k8s can get a bad rap is how expensive it is to even approach doing it right with cloud hosting, but to me it seems like a perfect use case for bare metal where there is no built in orchestration.
