

I run k3s on my bare metal cluster and for a lab I think it is excellent. Gets the cluster up and running easily so you can learn about actual Kubernetes stuff.
Personally I run it on fedora coreos, but I would not recommend that for everyone. I would just use whatever distri you like. All the usual suspects will work perfectly.


I’ve been using Authentik for a while now and it works very well. There is also a Teraform provider to manage it as code. I do mostly OIDC, but also use it as a proxy for a few things that do not support that and just need to be locked down (Esp home and longhorn dashboards for example).
The disadvantage is that it is not the lightest option. If that is important to you, look at Authelia.