DEVOPSdigest

Rancher Labs announced that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has accepted the company’s lightweight Kubernetes distribution – K3s – as its latest Sandbox project.

K3s was built to allow organizations to run Kubernetes in resource-constrained environments, in IoT devices or at the Edge. K3s joins 33 other early-stage Sandbox projects including Longhorn, a persistent Kubernetes storage solution, which Rancher Labs donated to the CNCF in October 2019.

Since its launch in February 2019, K3s has been downloaded over a million times and is installed, on average, more than 20,000 times every week.

With K3s as a CNCF Sandbox project, the open source community can further experiment and innovate with it – accelerating adoption.

The CNCF Sandbox provides an avenue for technically exciting projects that are beneficial to the cloud-native community and that the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) believes warrant experimentation. The Sandbox provides a neutral home to foster collaborative development and is the preferred path for early-stage projects to enter CNCF.

Key features of K3s include:

- Production-grade Kubernetes: K3s is a standards-compliant Kubernetes distribution engineered for mission-critical, production use cases.

- One binary with zero host dependencies: everything necessary to install Kubernetes on any device is included in a single, 40 MB binary. There is no requirement for an external installer like Kubespray, Kubeadm or RKE. With a single command, a single-node K3s cluster can be provisioned or upgraded.

- Simple to add nodes to a cluster: to add nodes to a cluster, admins run a single command on the new node, pointing it to the original server and passing through a secure token.

- Automatic certificate generation: all the certificates needed to establish TLS between the Kubernetes masters and nodes are automatically created when a cluster is launched. Encryption keys for service accounts are also automatically created.

Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO, Rancher Labs said: "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. By donating K3s to the CNCF, K3s' value will grow, and its adoption will accelerate. I am excited to see what new use cases emerge in the coming months and years."