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.