Container management software company Rancher Labs Inc. said today that its lightweight Kubernetes distribution K3s has been accepted as a sandbox project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Rancher Labs, which was recently acquired by SUSE Group, launched K3s last year in order to meet the growing demand enterprises have for smaller clusters of software containers that run on x86, Arm64 and Armv7 processors in edge computing environments. The company argues that existing Kubernetes distributions are too complex and memory-intensive for edge computing scenarios, which involve processing data onsite rather than at a remote data center.

Software containers are used to host the components of modern applications that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure without making changes to its underlying code. Kubernetes is the most popular tool for managing clusters of those containers.

K3s is essentially a stripped-down version of Kubernetes that removes a lot of its nonessential parts, including old application programming interface groups, nondefault admission controllers and storage drivers. Users can still add any parts they need, but these are not included by default. The distribution also minimizes memory usage by consolidating the processes that run on Kubernetes servers into a single one.

The CNCF is a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance Kubernetes and other container technologies and align the technology industry around its evolution. Projects housed by the CNCF tend to accelerate faster and see more adoption because it means more exposure to the wider cloud-native software development community.

Rancher Labs says K3s has already proved to be a hit even without the CNCF’s backing. The company claims it has been downloaded more than a million times and is installed by new users more than 20,000 times a week. Popular use cases include production line robots in smart factories, wind farms and remote military installations. Meanwhile, Rancher Labs itself has raised more than $90 million in venture capital funding to pursue the project.

“K3s is already benefiting a range of industries, from manufacturing to telecoms, and we are indebted to all those that have contributed to its evolution,” said Rancher Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Sheng Liang. “By donating K3s to the CNCF, K3s’ value will grow, and its adoption will accelerate.”

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that K3s’ adoption by the CNCF was fairly predictable given its popularity among enterprises.

“Given how close Rancher Labs’ parent SUSE is to the CNCF, it’s even less surprising,” Mueller said. “That acquisition will create greater synergies for K3s users and those that use the SUSE stack.”

K3s is the second project Rancher Labs has donated to the CNCF. Its first project was Longhorn, a persistent storage system for Kubernetes that was adopted by the CNCF in October 2019.

Image: Rancher Labs