Deploying K3s with Ansible: A Complete Tutorial

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What You’ll Build

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a reusable Ansible role that can deploy a K3s Kubernetes cluster to any set of Linux machines: homelab hardware, cloud VPS nodes, or both. The setup includes:

Automated K3s installation on server and agent nodes
WireGuard-encrypted pod-to-pod networking
Embedded etcd with HA support and S3 snapshot backups
iptables firewall rules tailored for K3s traffic
Multi-environment inventories so one codebase manages multiple clusters

If you’ve ever SSH’d into a box, run curl https://get.k3s.io | sh, and hoped for the best, this replaces that with something you can version-control, audit, and rebuild from scratch.

Devops on Zachary Fouts

Deploying K3s with Ansible: A Complete Tutorial

What You’ll Build