Name: K3s Lightweight Kubernetes
Rating: 9.1 (5 reviews)
Author: SUSE

Overview

What is K3s Lightweight Kubernetes?

K3s is a lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution built for IoT & Edge computing, developed by Rancher Labs, which is now supported by SUSE since the 2020 acquisition. K3s is available free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Light, simple and fast

9 out of 10

September 28, 2022

Incentivized

We use K3s Lightweight Kubernetes as a local Kubernetes cluster distribution for local development and when installing Kubernetes virtual …

Read all reviews

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

K3s Lightweight Kubernetes

N/A

Unavailable

What is K3s Lightweight Kubernetes?

K3s is a lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution built for IoT & Edge computing, developed by Rancher Labs, which is now supported by SUSE since the 2020 acquisition. K3s is available free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Entry-level set up fee?

No setup fee

Offerings

Free Trial
Free/Freemium Version
Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

4 people also want pricing

Alternatives Pricing

SAP Leonardo IoT

$1.11

Per Unit Per Month

What is SAP Leonardo IoT?

With SAP Leonardo Internet of Things (IoT) you can understand usage patterns and drive action from insight with customer-facing, digital IoT platform services and sensor data embedded in business processes.

Crestron XiO

$1

Per Room Per Month

What is Crestron XiO?

Crestron, headquartered in New Jersey, offers Crestron XiO, an Internet of Things (IoT) device management platform which provides automated hardware patching and firmware updates, device connectivity and condition monitoring, and analytics platform for tracking device usage.

Return to navigation

Product Demos

K3D Demo - Wrapper of K3S lightweight distribution

YouTube

Return to navigation

Product Details

About
Tech Details

What is K3s Lightweight Kubernetes?

K3s Lightweight Kubernetes Technical Details

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives

Compare with

Reviews and Ratings

(5)

Reviews

(1-1 of 1)

Sort By *

Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why

September 28, 2022

Light, simple and fast

Verified User

Manager in Engineering

Internet Company, 1001-5000 employees

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use K3s Lightweight Kubernetes as a local Kubernetes cluster distribution for local development and when installing Kubernetes virtual clusters. We either use K3s Lightweight Kubernetes with rancher-desktop or k3d running on our workstations or through vcluster when we want to deploy virtual Kubernetes clusters for ephemeral clusters or for testing Kubernetes versions that are not supported by the managed Kubernetes service from the Cloud Provider.

Pros and Cons

Virtual clusters
IoT devices
Local development
Raspberry Pi

Option to deploy a self managed k3s in the cloud
Support to deploy it with kubeadm
Integration with prometheus & grafana

Likelihood to Recommend

K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is well suited for local development. K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is not well suited when you need backward support. In the case that you want to test an application that is still using deprecated APIs or CRDs which are supported on popular managed Cloud Kubernetes Distributions, because K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is trying to be a lightweight application and dropping early support for APIs/CRDs marked for deprication K3s Lightweight Kubernetes will not be a good solution. If you are trying to test Kubernetes etc, functionality, K3s Lightweight Kubernetes is not a good case since it's using Dqlite or SQLite.

K3s Lightweight Kubernetes Feature Ratings

Internet of Things (2)

80%

8.0

IoT Device Management: 80%
8.0
Device Security: 80%
8.0

Return on Investment

Engineers have been able to run more microservices locally with K3s Lightweight Kubernetes instead of Minikube, which is more resources hungry

Alternatives Considered

We have mostly used kind, minikube, and Docker Desktop Kubernetes for local development. Only kind has lower resource requirements, but K3s Lightweight Kubernetes seems to be even lighter. It is a big benefit to be able to deploy a K3s Lightweight Kubernetes cluster in seconds locally in our workstation, there is no cost, and it makes it easy to redeploy from scratch no matter how many times we want. The removal of deprecated APIs or CRDs also makes it more secure since it reduces unnecessarily exposed attack vectors.