Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Traefik VS k3sup

Compare Traefik VS k3sup and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Traefik logo Traefik

Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

k3sup logo k3sup

from Zero to KUBECONFIG in < 1 min 🚀. Contribute to alexellis/k3sup development by creating an account on GitHub.
  • Traefik Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-13
  • k3sup Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-27

Traefik features and specs

  • Dynamic Configuration
    Traefik allows for dynamic configuration changes without needing restarts, making it easy to manage in rapidly evolving environments.
  • Kubernetes Integration
    Traefik has native support for Kubernetes, simplifying the process of managing ingress controllers and load balancing in containerized environments.
  • Service Discovery
    It supports automatic service discovery via various backends, including Docker, Consul, and Kubernetes, making it easy to integrate into many architectures.
  • HTTPS Support
    Traefik can automatically obtain and renew SSL/TLS certificates using Let's Encrypt, ensuring secure communications.
  • Middleware
    It supports middleware for handling tasks such as authentication, rate limiting, and retries, offering more control over traffic management.
  • Dashboard
    Traefik includes a built-in dashboard for monitoring and visualizing the routing configuration and health of services.

Possible disadvantages of Traefik

  • Complexity
    The flexibility and range of features can make Traefik complex to configure and understand for beginners.
  • Performance Overhead
    The additional abstraction layer can introduce some performance overhead, which might be a concern in high-performance environments.
  • Limited Advanced Features
    Although Traefik covers many standard use cases, it may lack some advanced features that are found in more specialized load balancers.
  • Documentation
    While improving, the documentation can sometimes be lacking in depth or clarity, which can lead to difficulties in configuration and troubleshooting.
  • Community Support
    Although there is an active community, it may not be as vast or responsive as that of some other more established software like NGINX or HAProxy.
  • Proprietary Features
    Some advanced features are only available in the enterprise edition, which might be a constraint for users looking for a completely open-source solution.

k3sup features and specs

  • Simplicity
    k3sup simplifies the process of setting up a lightweight Kubernetes cluster by providing an easy-to-use CLI tool, reducing the manual effort involved.
  • Speed
    It significantly speeds up the installation of k3s by automating many of the steps, allowing users to get a cluster up and running quickly.
  • Portability
    k3sup is compatible with various environments, including Raspberry Pi, virtual machines, and cloud services, offering flexibility in deployment.
  • No Overhead
    Since k3sup installs k3s without any additional overhead, it maintains the lightweight nature of the k3s distribution.
  • Open Source
    Being open source, k3sup allows developers to contribute to its development and adapt the source code to suit their specific needs.

Possible disadvantages of k3sup

  • Limited to k3s
    k3sup is specifically designed for k3s and may not be suitable for users who need to work with larger Kubernetes distributions or have specific deployment requirements not covered by k3s.
  • Basic Features
    While k3sup simplifies setup, it might lack some of the advanced features that more robust, full-featured Kubernetes management tools provide.
  • Community Support
    As a smaller, community-driven project, k3sup may not offer the same level of support and resources as more established Kubernetes tools.
  • Limited Automation
    Although k3sup automates the installation of k3s, further configuration and management of the cluster after setup may require additional scripting or manual intervention.
  • Dependency on SSH
    k3sup relies on SSH for remote connections, which means it requires proper SSH setup and permissions, potentially complicating configurations for some users.

Analysis of Traefik

Overall verdict

  • Traefik is a solid choice for managing and routing microservices traffic. Its lightweight design and broad feature set cater well to containerized and cloud-native environments. However, the final suitability of Traefik depends on specific project needs and architectural requirements, and organizations should evaluate it against their use cases.

Why this product is good

  • Traefik is considered good due to its flexibility, ease of use, and vibrant community. As a modern reverse proxy and load balancer, it is highly compatible with microservices and cloud-native environments. It supports various backends through dynamic configurations, provides seamless integration with Docker and Kubernetes, and offers automated SSL certificate management via Let's Encrypt. Traefik's extensive metrics and dashboarding capabilities also make it a favorable choice for monitoring traffic and performance metrics.

Recommended for

  • Microservices architectures
  • Containerized environments using Docker or Kubernetes
  • Cloud-native applications
  • Projects requiring dynamic and auto-updating configurations
  • Developers in need of automated SSL certificate management

Traefik videos

Traefik: A Scalable and Highly Available Edge Router by Damien Duportalt

More videos:

  • Review - Playing around with Traefik
  • Review - Rocket.Chat on Amazon EKS with Traefik. By Aaron Ogle, Lead Cloud Architect

k3sup videos

I - Pi &amp; Kubernetes with k3s, k3sup, arkade and OpenFaaS

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Traefik and k3sup)
Web Servers
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Computing
0 0%
100% 100
Web And Application Servers
DevOps Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Traefik and k3sup

Traefik Reviews

Top 5 Open Source Load Balancers in 2024
Traefik's prowess extends beyond the conventional, equipped with a robust set of middlewares that elevate its capabilities. Going beyond load balancing and reverse proxy roles, Traefik serves as a comprehensive solution for modern cloud-native applications, including API gateway, orchestrator ingress, east-west service communication, and more.
10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik is a reverse proxy and L7 load balancer. Written in Go, it’s designed to support microservices and container-powered services in a distributed system. It has native support for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration, as well as service registries such as etcd or Consul. It also offers extensive support for WebSocket, HTTP/2, and gRPC services. Traefik integrates...
Top 5 Open-Source Load Balancers 2021
The modern and efficient, Traefik is an open-source reverse proxy and load balancer that provides a simple routing platform without engaging any complexities. Most popular among the Github Fanclub, Traefik owns approximately 27.7k Github stars.
Source: linuxways.net
The 5 Best Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik bills itself as the “cloud native edge router.” It’s a modern microservices-focused application load balancer and reverse proxy written in Golang. With its emphasis on support for several modern container orchestration platforms, batteries-included logging, and several popular metric formats, Traefik is a top choice for container-based microservices architectures.
Source: logz.io

k3sup Reviews

We have no reviews of k3sup yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Traefik might be a bit more popular than k3sup. We know about 38 links to it since March 2021 and only 29 links to k3sup. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Traefik mentions (38)

  • Adventures in Homelabbing: From Cloud Obsession to Self-Hosted Shenanigans
    I began to self-host a Minecraft server using Crafty Controller, an Excalidraw instance, Docmost to replace Notion, Plane to replace Jira, and Penpot to replace Figma. To be able to access them from the internet, I used Nginx Proxy Manager to set up reverse proxies with SSL. You can use Traefik or Caddy instead, but I enjoyed the ease-of-use of NPM. For a dashboard solution, I started with Homarr, but later... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Nginx vs Traefik: Which Reverse Proxy is Right for You?
    Before diving into the specifics of Nginx and Traefik, let’s quickly define what a reverse proxy is. A reverse proxy sits between the client (browser or other services) and your backend services (web servers or applications). It handles incoming requests, routes them to the appropriate backend service, and forwards the response to the client. Reverse proxies are typically used for:. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Opening Pandora's Container - How Exposing the Docker Socket Paves the Way to Host Control (Part 1)
    You may wonder why one would even want to expose the Docker socket when there are clearly risks involved. A popular usecase besides accessing remote Docker daemons (which you can actually expose over a TCP socket) are applications that either need control of the daemon to manage other containers, like for example Portainer, or tools that need information about containers for auto discovery purposes, like Traefik.... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • The Home Server Journey - 3: An Actually Global "Hello"
    I emphasize usually because K3s is different and comes with a Traefik-based ingress controller by default. Taking that into account, as much as I like NGINX outside the container's world, I'd rather keep things simple and use what's already in place. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Running Docker based web applications in Hashicorp Nomad with Traefik Load balancing
    In previous post, we discussed creating a basic Nomad cluster in the Vultr cloud. Here, we will use the cluster created to deploy a load-balanced sample web app using the service discovery capability of Nomad and its native integration with the Traefik load balancer. The source code is available here for the reference. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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k3sup mentions (29)

  • How do you archive your side hobby projects?
    I recommend learning docker first, then pick a vps host from vpsbenchmarks, then use k3sup to deploy a kubernetes cluster on that, then follow a getting-started kubernetes tutorial from there. You'll also want to buy a domain name with tld-list and then provision a TLS certificate with cert-manager and letsencrypt (skip steps 1-4 because Google Cloud is overpriced). Source: about 2 years ago
  • What do you use as a kubernetes base?
    I just installed k3s yesterday using k3sup on 6 VMs (3 masters, 3 workers) each with 2GB RAM ( limited by the actual RAM on hardware, for now ) with Ubuntu 22.04 as the base OS. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What's a cheap way to setup your own Kubernetes cluster locally or remote?
    k3s installed with k3sup, longhorn for storage, kube-vip for API VIP, and MetalLB for service load balancer using local subnet, and of course Rancher. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Easiest way to provision and configure ephemeral cluster locally
    Yeah, this is the answer, but I would use this with K3S: https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Despliega un clúster de Kubernetes en segundos con k3sup
    $ curl -sLS https://get.k3sup.dev | sh x86_64 Downloading package https://github.com/alexellis/k3sup/releases/download/0.12.12/k3sup as /home/ec2-user/k3sup Download complete. ============================================================ The script was run as a user who is unable to write to /usr/local/bin. To complete the installation the following commands may need to be run... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Traefik and k3sup, you can also consider the following products

nginx - A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.

k3s - K3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution by Rancher Labs intended for IoT, Edge, and cloud deployments.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing - Amazon ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.

Kind - Kind is a web-based tool that provides you the features to operate the local kubernetes clusters with the help of a docker container named nodes.

Haproxy - Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers