Lightweight Kubernetes at the Edge with K3s#

K3s is a production-grade Kubernetes distribution packaged as a single binary under 100 MB. It was built for environments where resources are constrained and operational simplicity matters: edge locations, IoT gateways, retail stores, factory floors, branch offices, and CI/CD pipelines where you need a real cluster but cannot justify the overhead of a full Kubernetes deployment.

K3s achieves its small footprint by replacing etcd with SQLite (by default), embedding containerd directly, removing in-tree cloud provider and storage plugins, and packaging everything into a single binary. Despite these changes, K3s is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution – it passes the CNCF conformance tests and runs standard Kubernetes workloads without modification.

Time-Series Database Selection and Operations#

Time-series databases optimize for a specific access pattern: high-volume writes of timestamped data points, queries that aggregate over time ranges, and automatic expiration of old data. Choosing the right one depends on your data model, query patterns, retention requirements, and operational constraints.

When You Need a Time-Series Database#

A dedicated time-series database is justified when you have high write throughput (thousands to millions of data points per second), queries that are predominantly time-range aggregations, and data that has a defined retention period. Common use cases: infrastructure metrics, application performance monitoring, IoT sensor data, financial tick data, and log analytics.