Technology · Ebook

K3s: Lightweight Kubernetes for the Edge

by Shriira Press

K3s is a fully certified Kubernetes distribution packaged as one binary under seventy megabytes, built by Rancher and donated to the CNCF. It keeps the full Kubernetes API while stripping the weight — swapping etcd for embedded SQLite through a shim called kine, bundling containerd, Flannel, CoreDNS, Traefik, and a service load balancer inside the binary, and installing with a single curl command. This book covers what K3s is and why it exists, its server and agent nodes, the datastore options from SQLite to embedded etcd, the batteries-included networking and storage, how you install and operate a cluster, how high availability works, and where it fits in the cloud-native ecosystem. By the end you understand not just how to run K3s but why every design choice was made.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — Why K3s Exists
3. 3Chapter 2 — The Single Binary
4. 4Chapter 3 — Servers and Agents
5. 5Chapter 4 — The Datastore and Kine
6. 6Chapter 5 — Networking and Ingress
7. 7Chapter 6 — Storage and Packaged Components
8. 8Chapter 7 — Installing and Operating a Cluster
9. 9Chapter 8 — High Availability
10. 10Chapter 9 — K3s in Practice