Yet Another Kubernetes Distribution Debuts - This Time It Is From Mirantis Posted on : Nov 27 - 2020

According to Adam Parco, Vice President Of Engineering at Mirantis, K0s is to Kubernetes what Docker has been to containers. He implies that K0s brings the simplified developer experience of Docker to Kubernetes.

The distribution is called K0s because it has zero friction, zero dependencies, zero overhead, zero cost and zero downtime. K0s can be installed with a single command on any Linux distribution with no dependency on the host.

With a 160MB footprint, it’s one of the lightweight Kubernetes distributions available today. Kubernetes clusters based on K0s can be easily upgraded without any downtime to the applications.

Kubernetes has two components - the control plane and the worker nodes. The control plane is responsible for managing the entire cluster while the worker nodes run the applications.

K0s comes with strong isolation of the control plane, which brings an additional level of security. By default, the control plane doesn’t run any containers. That means the host running the control plane doesn’t even need to have a container runtime like Docker. Though it is possible to configure the K0s control plane and worker node on the same host, they may run in dedicated hosts in production environments.

It’s easy to deploy K0s on a developer laptop, bare metal servers, public cloud environments and even edge computing devices. In my early experiments with K0s, the installation process was simple and straightforward.

In future releases, K0s will support both Intel x86 and ARM processors. Support for joining Microsoft Windows Server 2019-based worker nodes on Linux’s control plane is in the works. This hybrid architecture of Linux and Windows makes it possible to mix and match workloads.

K0s competes with two other lightweight Kubernetes distributions - K3s from Rancher and Microk8s from Canonical. K3s is a CNCF project and a certified Kubernetes distribution, which is production-ready. Within months of its release, K3s got tremendous support from the community. It’s already a part of many edge computing projects from the retail and manufacturing domains. View More