Lightweight Kubernetes. Production ready, easy to install, half the memory, all in a binary less than 100 MB.
K3s bundles the following technologies together into a single cohesive distribution:
- Containerd & runc
- Flannel for CNI
- CoreDNS
- Metrics Server
- Traefik for ingress
- Klipper-lb as an embedded service load balancer provider
- Kube-router netpol controller for network policy
- Helm-controller to allow for CRD-driven deployment of helm manifests
- Kine as a datastore shim that allows etcd to be replaced with other databases
- Local-path-provisioner for provisioning volumes using local storage
- Host utilities such as iptables/nftables, ebtables, ethtool, & busybox
These technologies can be disabled or swapped out for technologies of your choice.
Additionally, K3s simplifies Kubernetes operations by maintaining functionality for:
- Managing the TLS certificates of Kubernetes components
- Managing the connection between worker and server nodes
- Auto-deploying Kubernetes resources from local manifests in realtime as they are changed.
- Managing an embedded etcd cluster