K8s, K3s, or Swarm? Choosing the Right Container Orchestrator in 2024 (Norwegian Edition)

The Orchestration Tax is Real

I’ve audited enough startup infrastructure in Oslo to know the pattern. A team of three developers decides they need a full HA Kubernetes cluster distributed across three availability zones before they even have their first paying customer. Six months later, they are burning 40% of their monthly recurring revenue on AWS management fees and spending half their week debugging ingress controllers instead of shipping code.

It stops now.

As of late 2024, the container orchestration landscape has calcified into three distinct tiers. If you are operating in the Nordic market, where data sovereignty (thank you, Schrems II) and latency to NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange) matter more than how many buzzwords you can fit in a pitch deck, you need to choose based on I/O requirements and team size, not hype.

Let’s look at the three contenders: Kubernetes (K8s), K3s, and the unkillable cockroach that is Docker Swarm.

1. Kubernetes (The 800lb Gorilla)

Kubernetes version 1.31 dropped recently. It’s robust. It’s standard. It’s also incredibly resource-hungry. The control plane alone will eat a significant chunk of a standard VPS if you aren't careful. However, for teams running microservices with complex auto-scaling needs, it is the only professional choice.

The Hidden Cost: Etcd Latency

The number one reason K8s clusters fail in production isn't bad config; it's slow storage. The etcd key-value store is allergic to disk latency. If your fsync latency spikes above 10ms, your cluster leader election fails, and your API server starts flapping.

This is where hardware matters. We run CoolVDS instances on pure NVMe arrays precisely for this reason. Spinning rust (HDD) or network-choked generic cloud storage will kill a K8s cluster under load.

Here is a standard resource-capped deployment. Note the resources block. Without this, a memory leak in one pod kills the neighbor node.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: production-api
  namespace: backend
spec:
  replicas: 3
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: api
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: api
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: go-api
        image: registry.coolvds.com/api:v2.4.1
        resources:
          requests:
            memory: "128Mi"
            cpu: "250m"
          limits:
            memory: "512Mi"
            cpu: "1000m"
        readinessProbe:
          httpGet:
            path: /healthz
            port: 8080
          initialDelaySeconds: 5
          periodSeconds: 10

2. K3s (The Pragmatic Choice)

If you are running a team of less than 10 engineers, or you are deploying to edge locations (or just want to save money), K3s is superior to upstream K8s. It strips out the legacy cloud provider plugins and replaces etcd with a lighter alternative (SQLite by default, or external MySQL/PostgreSQL).

It compiles into a single binary less than 100MB. We see a lot of Norwegian agencies moving to this. You get the Kubernetes API compatibility (so your Helm charts still work), but you don't need a dedicated DevOps engineer just to keep the lights on.

Installation on a CoolVDS Instance

Unlike the nightmare of kubeadm, K3s installs in seconds. Here is how you bootstrap a production-ready node pointing to an external DB for HA:

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -s - server \
  --datastore-endpoint="mysql://k3s_user:SecurePass123!@db-private.coolvds.net:3306/k3s" \
  --node-taint CriticalAddonsOnly=true:NoExecute \
  --tls-san="api.yourdomain.no"

Pro Tip: By using an external database (managed MySQL or Postgres) for the K3s state, you can treat your control plane nodes as disposable. If a node dies, just spin up a new CoolVDS instance, run the script, and it rejoins the cluster.

3. Docker Swarm (The "It Just Works" Option)

Tech Twitter loves to say Swarm is dead. Yet, in 2024, it is still built into the Docker Engine. Why? Because it is simple.

If you have a monolith and a Redis cache, or a simple 3-service stack, Kubernetes is overkill. Swarm gives you overlay networking, secrets management, and rolling updates with zero external dependencies.

The docker-compose.yml file you use for development is 90% of the way to production. No YAML hell.

version: '3.8'
services:
  web:
    image: nginx:alpine
    deploy:
      replicas: 2
      update_config:
        parallelism: 1
        delay: 10s
      restart_policy:
        condition: on-failure
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    networks:
      - webnet
networks:
  webnet:

Deploying this is one command: docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.yml production. Done. No Ingress controllers, no CRDs.

Infrastructure Comparison Table

The Geographic Reality: Latency and Law

Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum. If your users are in Oslo, Bergen, or Trondheim, hosting your cluster in Frankfurt adds 20-30ms of round-trip latency. That might sound small, but it compounds with every TCP handshake and TLS negotiation.

Furthermore, the Datatilsynet (Norwegian Data Protection Authority) is becoming increasingly strict regarding GDPR compliance and data transfers outside the EEA. Hosting on a US-owned cloud provider introduces legal friction that many CTOs ignore until legal sends a panic email.

By utilizing local infrastructure like CoolVDS, you solve two problems:

1. Performance: You are physically closer to the NIX, ensuring your TTFB (Time To First Byte) is minimal.
2. Compliance: Your data sits on drives physically located in secure Nordic data centers, simplifying your Article 30 records of processing activities.

Verdict

Don't resume-driven-develop your infrastructure.

• Choose Kubernetes if you have a dedicated platform team and need specific CRDs (like Cert-Manager or Istio).
• Choose K3s if you want the K8s API without the bloat. This is the sweet spot for 90% of our customers.
• Choose Swarm if you just want to run a few containers and go home on time.

Whatever you choose, the underlying metal dictates stability. Orchestrators can't fix slow disks or noisy neighbors. Ensure your foundation is solid.

Need a test environment? Spin up a high-performance NVMe instance on CoolVDS today and see how fast K3s can actually run.