Comparative Analysis of Ubuntu Chiseled and Standard Images for Resource Optimization in K3s-Orchestrated IoT Applications

This study evaluates the operational efficiency of Canonical?s Ubuntu Chiseled images compared to standard Ubuntu images within K3s-orchestrated environments on IoT hardware. A Python-Flask microservice deployed on Raspberry Pi 4 devices served as the benchmark workload. The research measured key performance indicators including image size, memory and CPU usage, startup latency, and network throughput. Results show that chiseled images reduce image size by 85%, memory usage by 62%, and startup time by 56%, without degrading throughput. These findings support the use of minimalist base images in resource-constrained edge deployments and represent one of the first orchestration-level performance assessments of chiseled containers in K3s.