Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Less than two days after its release, the number of Star on GitHub has reached nearly 3000. Have you tried the industry's hottest and lightest open source Kubernetes release in history?

Rancher senior architect to teach you to take the first step! Use the tutorial here!

Foreword

Yesterday, Rancher Labs officially released K3s, the lightest open source Kubernetes distribution in history. The K3s is only 40m in size, minimalist, lightweight and easy to use. K3s is designed for R & D and operation personnel running Kubernetes in a resource-limited environment, especially for emerging usage scenarios such as edge computing, IoT, ARM and CI. At the same time, K3s supports x86x64, ARM64, and ARMv7 architectures, making it more flexible to work across any edge infrastructure.

Less than two days after the release of K3s, we received a lot of positive feedback from the industry, and everyone's enthusiasm made us feel that innovation in the container field was still on the way. K3s has successfully become a CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution, and the number of GitHub star of K3s approaches 3000 in just one day. News and technical media at home and abroad pay close attention to it, and Kelsey Hightower, a widely respected master in the container technology circle, also tweeted to express his appreciation. What Rancher does is that we never forget the original intention, we always want to be a cloud infrastructure vendor, and adhere to innovation, Rancher/RKE/RancherOS/Longhorn/Rio/K3s these products continue to expand our technology landscape. So what exactly is K3s? What is the main innovation? Let's give it a try.

Give it a try.

We start two virtual machines in AWS, the system is RancherOS v1.5.1, of course, you can also replace it with your familiar OS. However, the K3s project is still in the development stage, and some OS adaptations have not yet been completed. Ubuntu will be another good choice.

RancherOS is a minimalist Linux tailored for containers, and the use of RancherOS here gives us a fuller understanding of how little K3s relies on OS. K3s has used containerd instead of Docker to do runtime, so we can stop Docker in RancherOS. Containerd itself is part of Docker and is fully compatible with the familiar Docker image.

The default server comes with its own agent, and you can use the-disable-agent parameter to make it provide only server functionality.

Get node token

Add an additional agent,node_token to replace with the content returned in the previous step. Again, we no longer need docker, so we still stop Docker in RancherOS.

Since K3s removes a lot of Legacy/alpha/non-default features from K8s, don't try it with a particularly complex yaml file. The basic common deployment is supported, so we can deploy a deployment.

Of course, we can also add K3s to Rancher. Currently, the import method is supported, although it is not perfect, but we will continue to update and enhance the experience. You need to download the yaml file required for the Rancher import cluster, unlike the native K8s, where K3s import requires the use of K3s kubectl.

After waiting for a period of time, you can see that the K3s cluster has been imported successfully. Because K3s streamlines a lot of K8s components, etcd is not enabled by default (sqlite3 is used by default), so some errors can be ignored for the time being.

We can also use Rancher UI to create a simple workload.

K3s, push Kubernetes in the edge computing scenario

The name "K3s" means "5 Less Than K8s". Its size, resource requirements, complexity, difficulty of use, etc. [less than half of Kubernetes], is extremely lightweight and easy to use.

For manufacturing, retail, financial, telecommunications, utilities and other industries, or for anyone who recognizes that Kubernetes is an ideal platform for managing edge infrastructure, but it is difficult to invest a lot of resources in edge devices to run a mature Kubernetes platform, K3s is a creative new product with great progress.

K3s is packaged as a single binary without host dependencies, with a size of only 40m, but contains everything you need to run Kubernetes, including the container runtime and any important host utilities such as iptables, socat, and du. With just one command, you can configure or upgrade a single-node K3s cluster, or add nodes to the cluster.

With extremely low resource consumption, simple operation, easy to use, the concept of simplicity, and, most importantly, to creatively meet the needs of edge computing scenarios, K3s has received worldwide attention and recognition from corporate customers, open source users, industry cattle, media, technology community and so on.

Less than two days after release, the number of Star on GitHub is approaching 3000:

On the day K3s was released, all kinds of related news directly reached the top of Google Kubernetes keyword search results:

The popularity of the discussion on Hacker News remains high:

K3s passed the CNCF certification and became an official certified Kubernetes distribution. Dan Kohn, CEO of CNCF, personally congratulated:

Support from large number of community users:

Daniel Kelsey Hightower, who is widely respected in the technology circle, highly praises K3s:

Some thoughts

In recent years, Rancher has increasingly felt the management needs of outside datacenter, not only from the manufacturing industry with the background of the Internet of things, but also from the fast food chain industry in the United States. These real demands of edge computing promote us to innovate. Transplanting container technology to edge computing scenarios is a very good choice. Containers have a good ecosystem and can naturally shield hardware differences, which brings great convenience in deployment management. Container technology, especially Kubernetes, is becoming more mature at the data center level, but there are still many problems in completely porting to edge computing scenarios. For example, K8s consumes more computing resources than edge devices can afford, and many K8s distributions cannot support ARM. Currently, most edge devices are ARM. These are the real problems that Rancher wants to solve when creating the K3s project. K3s is not only a product of Rancher, we will also promote it to become the standard of Kubernetes in the field of edge computing.

In the future, Rancher container management platform will become a product that can manage both datacenter K8s and outside K3s. Users can choose RancherOS, a highly streamlined container operating system, and Longhorn, a storage system built specifically for containers, to meet the storage needs within and between clouds. In the upcoming release of Rancher 2.2, Rancher has completed its support for ARM, so the layout of Rancher has been expanded a lot, and there will be more support for edge computing.

The home page of the K3s official website is now online, you can visit https://k3s.io to learn more about the K3s project.

At the same time, you are welcome to download, install and use K3s through the GitHub page https://github.com/rancher/k3s.

Next week we will conduct the first product best practice and architecture training of K3s for Rancher paid subscribers. Enterprises that need assistance in deploying and managing K3s can contact yiyi@rancher.com by email, or add Wechat Assistant (rancher2) to consult for their friends.

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