Rancher Labs Inc. is looking to cater to enterprises that want to run Kubernetes in information technology environments constrained by limited resources.

The company, which sells software for managing application containers, has unveiled 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.

Application containers are used to host software that can run on any kind of computing infrastructure without making changes to its underlying code. Kubernetes, meanwhile, is the most popular tool for managing clusters of those containers. But Rancher Labs says it has identified a problem: Existing Kubernetes distributions are often too complex and memory-intensive for edge scenarios, where information is processed on site rather than in a remote data center.

“In the last year we’ve worked with dozens of teams who see Kubernetes as an ideal platform for managing edge infrastructure but have been reluctant to commit a large portion of resources in their edge devices to run a full-fledged Kubernetes platform,” said Sheng Liang, cofounder and chief executive officer of Rancher Labs. “With K3s, we can provide these teams with a distribution of Kubernetes that requires less than 512 MB of RAM, and is ideally suited for edge use cases.”

K3s is essentially a stripped-down version of Kubernetes that removes lots of 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 new distribution also minimizes memory usage by consolidating the processes that run on Kubernetes servers into a single one.

In addition, K3s uses the lightweight containerd runtime, the software instructions executed while a program is running, instead of Docker. It also uses SQLite instead of the more resource-intensive etcd data store that’s commonly used with Kubernetes.

Rancher Labs said K3s supports x86_64, Arm64 and Armv7 architectures, meaning it can be deployed across almost any kind of edge computing infrastructure.

Image: Rancher Labs