Developer advocate at Civo, Kai Hoffman, writes for ITProPortal on the different container options available for developers today and how a managed service can be a quicker, easier, and more cost-effective to get going with Kubernetes.
Ge begins by suggesting that a managed service could be the best bet for start-ups and SMEs, who may not have the resources to invest in a bare metal or a self-managed service.
“Along with less pressure to maintain a team internally, managed Kubernetes can also offer better reliability and security. Managed Kubernetes providers can have teams of engineers whose job is ensuring the stability of customer environments and deployments, allowing these customer organizations to concentrate on shipping code.”
The article goes onto look at why Rancher Lab's lightweight Kubernetes distribution K3s could be the answer for smaller, agile teams and businesses looking to get into containers and cloud native.
“The much-reduced footprint of K3s means that it’s possible to run a cluster on nodes that have anything from 512MB of RAM upwards. This means that it is possible to run workloads on the control plane node as well as dedicated worker nodes if required, and the single, small binary means that it can install in a fraction of the time it takes to launch regular Kubernetes clusters."
The recent success of K3s serves only to highlight its potential to be one of the primary distributions of Kubernetes in-production in the future.
“According to Rancher Labs, K3s was downloaded more than a million times in its first year – that works out as an extraordinary 20,000 times every week. We are already seeing growing utilization of K3s in production environments across the enterprise, from edge settings with limited hardware, to supporting data center workloads. A lightweight distribution opens the doors to what is possible with orchestration software. Given adoption is only set to continue to rise, K3s is clearly on course to rise to prominence in the Kubernetes space."
Finally, Kai looks to the future and how K3s might help shape containers in the next few years.
“The really exciting shift we are seeing is more firms utilizing K3s in production environments, supporting high-compute, business-critical workloads across the enterprise. This trend is driven by the growth of managed K3s, offering businesses a credible way to spin up clusters at pace and run them at a fraction of a price – a significant sea change from K8s."
Read the full article here.