I am trying to install Kubernetes on Debian 9 (stretch) server, which is on cloud and therefore can't do virtualization. And it doesn't have systemd. Also, I'm trying for really minimal configuration, not big cluster.
I've found Minikube, https://docs.gitlab.com/charts/development/minikube/index.html which is supposed to run without virtualization using docker, but it requires systemd, as mentioned here https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/issues/2704 (and yes I get the related error message).
I also found k3s, https://github.com/rancher/k3s which can run either on systemd or openrc, but when I install openrc using https://wiki.debian.org/OpenRC I don't have the "net" service it depends on.
Then I found microk8s, https://microk8s.io/ which needs systemd simply because snapd needs systemd.
Is there some other alternative or solution to mentioned problems? Or did Poettering already bribed everyone?
Since you are well off the beaten path, you can probably just run things by hand with k3s. It's a single executable AFAIK. See https://github.com/rancher/k3s#manual-download as a simple starting point. You will eventually want some kind of service monitor to restart things if they crash, if not systemd then perhaps Upstart (which is not packaged for Deb9) or Runit (which itself usually runs under supervision).