Container management software company Rancher Labs Inc. is looking to extend deployments of Kubernetes beyond data centers and cloud-native architectures.

The company sells a lightweight Kubernetes distribution called K3s that’s meant to address growing demand for smaller clusters running on x86, Arm64 and Armv7 processors in edge computing environments.

Kubernetes is the most popular tool for managing clusters of software containers, which are used to host software that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure without making changes to its underlying code.

Rancher Labs said today the latest release of its platform, based on Kubernetes 1.18, is part of its wider “Kubernetes everywhere” strategy, and that it envisages scaling up to deployments of 1 million clusters in future releases. The latest 2.4 release supports up to 2,000 clusters and 100,000 nodes.

In a blog post, Rancher Labs’ global director of product marketing Tom Callway said its Kubernetes everywhere strategy is based on forecasts that edge networks and “internet of things” devices will drive massive adoption of the software in the next two years, as it means data processing will increasingly shift from data centers to the edge. Juniper Research, for example, says the industrial sector alone will account for about 60 billion IoT connections by 2024, up 130% from the number of existing connections today.

Rancher Labs is confident that the increased network traffic and data generated by those connections will need industrial-grade cluster orchestration. And it says its Kubernetes distribution is the only platform capable of providing this.

The company’s approach is based on automating as many orchestration tasks as possible. It says that leads to a reduction in maintenance tasks and stronger security. The new release comes with cluster security features based on Center for Internet Security benchmark scanning, for example.

Rancher Labs is also offering a hosted version of its platform for the first time, saying that this is a good option for companies that want to avoid the hassle of deploying and maintaining Kubernetes themselves. The hosted version comes with a dedicated Amazon Web Services instance of a server management controller.

Rancher Labs further believes that companies will want to move to more of a “fleet management” approach with their deployments, with clusters managed via a central control plane. The approach makes it possible to run “production-grade lightweight Kubernetes clusters on smart low-powered edge devices and manage them consistently as a fleet,” the company said.

Rancher Labs said the fleet management capability will be added to its platform later this year, enabling “edge-scale Kubernetes deployments.”

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