Lightweight Kubernetes. Easy to install, half the memory, all in a binary of less than 50mb.

Great for:

• Edge
• IoT
• CI
• ARM
• Situations where a PhD in K8s clusterology is infeasible

What is K3s?

K3s is a fully compliant Kubernetes distribution with the following enhancements:

• An embedded SQLite database has replaced etcd as the default datastore. External datastores such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and etcd are also supported.
• Simple but powerful “batteries-included” features have been added, such as: a local storage provider, a service load balancer, a Helm controller, and the Traefik ingress controller.
• Operation of all Kubernetes control plane components is encapsulated in a single binary and process. This allows K3s to automate and manage complex cluster operations like distributing certificates.
• In-tree cloud providers and storage plugins have been removed.
• External dependencies have been minimized (just a modern kernel and cgroup mounts needed). K3s packages required dependencies, including:
  • containerd
  • Flannel
  • CoreDNS
  • Host utilities (iptables, socat, etc)