Rancher Labs launched general availability of its k3s edge-specific Kubernetes distribution, which is designed for easier management of Kubernetes in resource-constrained environments. The company also announced the beta release of Rio, its new application deployment engine for Kubernetes that delivers a fully integrated deployment experience from operations to pipeline.

Both announcements come at a time where Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto container orchestration platform to support the mass migration to containerize and the orchestration of applications in hybrid- and multi-cloud environments. In Rancher’s view, the next challenge will be to take the same model to the edge. 

Rancher initially unveiled k3s earlier this year. It's basically a slimmer version of Kubernetes, which is often referred to as “k8s.” That slimness is important because edge locations are more resource constrained compared with data center or network core locations.

Shannon Williams, co-founder and VP of sales at Rancher Labs, told SDxCentral that the vendor pulled “alpha-level features that were still in development and also deprecated features” that were no longer needed or supported. This allowed the vendor to push out a platform that consumes just 40 megabytes of space and can run on x86_64, Armv8-A, and Armv7-A architectures.

“We didn’t completely change how Kubernetes works,” Williams said. “We removed drivers that were not essential for edge deployments, but still allow a customer to pull down those drivers if they need them.”

That work with Arm also targeted a re-architecting of how the edge and cloud infrastructure operated. Bhumik Patel, director of software ecosystem at Arm, said in an interview with Rancher that k3s is more efficient at the edge because it removes unnecessary lines of code from Kubernetes that aren’t necessary in edge environments. This in turn allows it to be used in those remote or unusual circumstances.  

In other words, k3s gets comfortable in the uncomfortable. 

“The combination of Arm Neoverse-based edge optimized hardware and Rancher’s certified, lightweight Kubernetes distribution enables edge devices with advanced tooling originally developed for the cloud,” said Kevin Ryan, senior director of software ecosystem at Arm, in a prepared statement. “General availability of k3s is a significant milestone in delivering more robust and less costly experiences for enterprises looking to expand their strategic initiatives out to the edge.”

Rancher also offers an operating system specific to k3s that uses the same declarative syntax as other Kubernetes resources. This allows a user to install and upgrade the k3s platform and the k3OS at the same time.

Rio was first announced in May, but this latest release  — v0.6.0. — features a combination of cloud-native technologies that the vendor claims will simplify the developer’s workstation to the production environment while ensuring a robust and secure code deployment experience.

Rancher is pitching the lightweight, cloud-native platform as a fully integrated deployment experience from operations to pipeline without taking over the cluster.

“At the peak of the stack of Rancher products, Rio completes the story of how organizations can deploy and manage their applications and containers,” wrote Rancher Labs Field Manager Eamon Bauman in a recent blog post. “When combined with products such as Rancher 2.3, k3s, and [Rancher Kubernetes Engine], Rio completes the story of how organizations can deploy and manage their applications and containers."