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Internationalization became “i18n,” and that’s how Kubernetes became “K8s.” This form of abbreviation comes from the suite of programming libraries for internationalization, which is a word that developers simply got tired of typing. K8s comes from “Kubernetes” where there are eight characters between the K and the S.
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Rancher K3s shortened its name to K3s, and it is the only Kubernetes distribution in the CNCF landscape that is owned by the CNCF. Realizing that what started as an internal project, with a limited scope was now in the hands of the community, Rancher donated K3s to the CNCF. Interest picked up from governments who wanted to use K3s in air-gapped environments and places that would benefit from its minimal attack surface. They certify Kubernetes distributions as conformant, which means that a workload that runs in one certified distribution will run in another certified distribution.Ĭertification by the CNCF opened the door for K3s installations in environments like wind farms, satellites, airplanes, vehicles, and boats. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is the governing body that controls Kubernetes and many other open source projects. Rancher K3s was born, and at the time, no one had any idea that it would be so popular. For the first time, someone could run Kubernetes on a system with only one GB of RAM and still have memory available for the workloads. This enabled Kubernetes to run in resource-constrained environments like IoT and the edge. The result was a Kubernetes distribution that clocked in at under 50MB and that ran all of Kubernetes in under 512MB of RAM. He created a single binary solution that unpacked to include containerd, the networking stack, the control plane (server) and worker (agent) components, SQLite instead of etcd, a service load balancer, a storage class for local storage, and manifests that pulled down and installed other core components like CoreDNS and Traefik Proxy as the ingress controller. This included all out-of-tree and alpha resources, storage drivers, and the requirement for etcd as the backend datastore.
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He started picking it apart, removing all of the extraneous content that wasn’t necessary to run workloads in his environment. Rancher already had the Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE), so Darren was intimately familiar with the Kubernetes source code.
#WHAT IS KUBERNETES AND HOW TO USE IT CODE#
He knew that if he could bring clusters online faster, he could code faster, and if he could code faster, he could ship features faster. While building Rio (no longer active), Darren Shepherd from Rancher Labs (now part of SUSE) found himself frustrated by how long it took to spin up a new Kubernetes cluster for every test run. That said, it is important to note that K3s is not a fork, as it doesn’t change any of the core Kubernetes functionalities and remains close to stock Kubernetes. In simple terms, K3s is Kubernetes with bloat stripped out and a different backing datastore. It has a very small binary size and very low resource requirements. K3s is highly available and production-ready. K3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution created by Rancher Labs, and it is fully certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Best practices for building containers state that the container should only contain the resources that it needs to perform its function, so why should the container orchestrator be any different? By getting rid of unnecessary components, K3s manages to solve many of the issues developers face in stock Kubernetes. Unused resources result in longer installation times, a larger attack surface, and additional complexity.
#WHAT IS KUBERNETES AND HOW TO USE IT FREE#
Free Course: Master Traefik Proxy with K3s