Kubernetes, K3s, or Swarm? Orchestration Realities for Nordic Infrastructure in 2024

Let's be honest: 90% of the teams I consult for don't need a multi-region, federation-enabled Kubernetes cluster. They build it anyway. Then, three months later, they call me at 3 AM because their control plane is timing out, or their cloud bill has tripled due to egress fees and managed control plane costs.

In 2024, the container orchestration landscape has stabilized, but the decision paralysis hasn't. Whether you are running a fintech stack in Oslo or a SaaS platform serving the wider European market, the latency between your nodes and the disk I/O available to your state store (usually etcd) defines your stability. I've seen "perfect" architectures fail because the underlying VPS storage couldn't handle the fsync rates required by Kubernetes.

This guide cuts through the vendor noise. We are looking at the raw trade-offs between full-blown Kubernetes, the lightweight K3s, and the stubborn survivor, Docker Swarm—specifically from the perspective of running on high-performance VDS in Norway.

The "War Story": When Latency Kills Consensus

Last month, a client deployed a standard Kubernetes cluster (v1.29 at the time) across cheap VPS instances hosted in a generic "European" region. They faced random API server crashes. The logs were screaming:

etcdserver: read-only range request "key-prefix" with result "range_response_count:0 size:0" took too long (184.921ms) to execute

The problem wasn't their config. It was the noisy neighbors on their provider's spinning rust (HDD) or oversold SSDs. Etcd is sensitive. If disk write latency spikes, the cluster loses consensus. We migrated them to CoolVDS NVMe instances in Oslo. The result? Etcd write latency dropped to sub-2ms. Stability restored instantly.

1. Kubernetes (The Standard)

Best for: Teams needing the full CNCF ecosystem, CRDs, and Service Mesh implementations (Istio/Linkerd).

Standard Kubernetes (K8s) is resource-hungry. A proper HA control plane needs at least 3 nodes just for itself before you schedule a single application pod. However, it offers the ultimate flexibility.

Performance Tuning for VDS

If you run K8s on bare VDS (using tools like kubeadm), you must tune the API server and etcd. Don't accept defaults.

# Inside your etcd.yaml or kubeadm config
# Increase heartbeat interval to account for network jitter
server:
  heartbeat-interval: 250
  election-timeout: 2500

Furthermore, ensure your underlying OS handles memory correctly. Disable swap, as K8s schedulers despise it:

sudo swapoff -a
# Persist in /etc/fstab by commenting out the swap line

2. K3s (The Efficient Choice)

Best for: Edge computing, single-node clusters, or small-to-medium production environments where memory is precious.

Rancher's K3s strips away the bloat. It replaces the heavy `etcd` with a shim that can interface with SQLite (for single node) or external DBs, though it also supports embedded etcd. The binary is less than 100MB. For a startup in Norway dealing with strict budgets but high uptime requirements, K3s on a CoolVDS instance is the sweet spot.

Deploying K3s is deceptively simple, but here is how you do it for production (disabling the default Traefik ingress if you prefer Nginx):

curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | INSTALL_K3S_EXEC="--disable=traefik" sh -

3. Docker Swarm (The Pragmatic)

Best for: Teams that want to write docker-compose.yml and go home.

Swarm isn't dead. It's stable. It doesn't use CRDs, and it doesn't have the operator pattern. But if you just need to replicate Nginx and a Python backend across 3 nodes, K8s is engineering overhead you don't need.

Technical Comparison: Resources & Latency

The Norwegian Context: GDPR & Latency

Operating in 2024, we deal with the fallout of Schrems II. Data residency is not just a nice-to-have; it's a legal minefield. Using US-managed clouds often introduces complexity regarding data transfer mechanisms.

Hosting your orchestration layer on CoolVDS guarantees your data stays in Norway (or your chosen European zone). More importantly, the latency from Oslo to internet exchanges like NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange) is negligible.

Pro Tip: When using storage classes in Kubernetes on VDS, avoid network-attached block storage if possible for IO-intensive databases. Use the local NVMe storage with a `LocalPersistentVolume` provisioner. It ties the pod to the node, but the IOPS gain is massive.

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: local-storage
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer

Verifying Your I/O Before Install

Before you install kubeadm or k3s, run this benchmark on your VDS. If your fsync latency is above 10ms, your etcd cluster will be unstable.

fio --rw=write --ioengine=sync --fdatasync=1 --directory=test-data --size=22m --bs=2300 --name=mytest

On CoolVDS NVMe instances, we typically see the 99th percentile latency well under 2ms. This "hardware reality" is why our platform is the reference implementation for self-managed Kubernetes in the Nordics. We don't steal CPU cycles, and we don't throttle your disk I/O.

Conclusion: Simplify the Stack

If you are building the next banking app, use Kubernetes. If you are a lean dev team, look hard at K3s. In either case, the software is only as good as the infrastructure it runs on. Don't let IO wait times destroy your cluster's quorum.

Ready to test your cluster performance? Spin up a high-frequency NVMe instance in Oslo. Run the fio test yourself. The numbers won't lie.