SUSE® Rancher Prime: K3s

K3s is an official CNCF sandbox project that delivers a lightweight yet powerful certified Kubernetes distribution designed for production workloads across resource-restrained, remote locations or on IoT devices. When used with SUSE® Rancher Prime, K3s is simple to install, lightweight yet high availability Kubernetes distribution that can be easily managed within the Rancher orchestration platform.

Key Features

  • Distributed as a single binary or minimal container image.

  • Lightweight datastore based on sqlite3 as the default storage backend. etcd3, MySQL, and Postgres are also available.

  • Wrapped in simple launcher that handles a lot of the complexity of TLS and options.

  • Secure by default with reasonable defaults for lightweight environments.

  • Operation of all Kubernetes control plane components is encapsulated in a single binary and process, allowing K3s to automate and manage complex cluster operations like distributing certificates.

  • External dependencies have been minimized; the only requirements are a modern kernel and cgroup mounts.

  • Packages the required dependencies for easy "batteries-included" cluster creation:

    • containerd / cri-dockerd container runtime (CRI)

    • Flannel Container Network Interface (CNI)

    • CoreDNS Cluster DNS

    • Traefik Ingress controller

    • ServiceLB Load-Balancer controller

    • Kube-router Network Policy controller

    • Local-path-provisioner Persistent Volume controller

    • Spegel distributed container image registry mirror

    • Host utilities (iptables, socat, etc)

Great for:

  • Edge

  • Homelab

  • Internet of Things (IoT)

  • Continuous Integration (CI)

  • Development

  • Single board computers (ARM)

  • Air-gapped environments

  • Embedded K8s

  • Situations where a PhD in K8s clusterology is infeasible