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K3s Lightweight Kubernetes

Score9.4 out of 10

5 Reviews and Ratings

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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.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features K3s Lightweight Kubernetes has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 5 ratings of K3s Lightweight Kubernetes's features
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Top Performing Features

  • IoT Device Management

    Software for provisioning configuring, troubleshooting and managing IoT devices and gateways remotely.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Device Security

    Security to prevent connected devices from being hacked or compromised.

    Category average: 8.3

Areas for Improvement

Reviews

What users are saying about K3s Lightweight Kubernetes.
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Light, simple and fast

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (1001-5000 employees employees)

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

  • Virtual clusters
  • IoT devices
  • Local development
  • Raspberry Pi

Cons

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

Return on Investment

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

Other Software Used

Doppler, GitHub, Google Kubernetes Engine