Both are ways to manage containers, and both can use the same container runtime provider, IIRC. They are different in how they manage the containers, with docker/docker-compose being suited for development or one-off services, and kubernetes being more suitable for running and managing a bunch of containers in production, across machines, etc. Think of kubernetes as the pokemon evolution of docker.

I did come across it before, but it feels like just another layer of abstraction over k8s, and with a smaller ecosystem. Also, I prefer terminal to web UI.

Setting up k8s with k3s is barely two commands. Works out of the box without any further config. Heck, even a multi-node cluster is pretty straightforward to setup. That’s what we’re using at work.

Several services are interlinked, and I want to share configs across services. Docker doesn’t provide a clean interface for separating and bundling network interfaces, storage, and containers like k8s.

I used docker for my homeserver for several years, but managing everything with a single docker compose file that I edit over SSH became too tiring, so I moved to kubernetes using k3s. Painless setup, and far easier to control and monitor remotely. The learning curve is there, but I already use kubernetes at work. It’s way easier to setup routing and storage with k3s than juggling volumes was with docker, for starters.