The New Stack Context: Kubernetes Moves to the Edge

Late last month, Rancher Labs donated its popular K3s Kubernetes distribution to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. This stripped-down version of Kubernetes has been a quiet hit among cloud native users — many who are deploying to edge environs.

So for this week’s episode of The New Stack Context podcast, we invited Rancher co-founder Darren Shepherd to discuss what Rancher is seeing in the cloud native ecosystem. Rancher is in the process of being acquired by SUSE and, because the deal is still pending, Darren could not comment but he did chat about K3s, as well as Kubernetes.

The New Stack editorial and marketing director Libby Clark hosted this episode, alongside TNS senior editor Richard MacManus, and TNS managing editor Joab Jackson.

Episode 132: Darren Shepard of Rancher – Who Needs Kubernetes Operators Anyway?

With the rise of Kubernetes and K3s on the edge environments, such as fast-food restaurants and industrial assembly lines, Shepherd noted that the edge used to run “fairly simple” applications like point-of-sale devices. But now people are trying to deploy fairly complicated software like Kafka on the edge.

“They’re trying to leverage all of the ecosystem and all the tooling of the open source world, so they’re able to deploy more complex software. But the demands of deploying that software have gotten more complicated, so they need a better technology to be able to do this,” Rancher explained.

Other topics we discussed:

• How Rancher got started.
• The birth of K3s.
• The “donation” of K3s to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
• K3s for edge computing.
• Takeaways from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU.
• The downsides of Operators.
• GitOps vs. Operators.
• The upcoming release of Rancher 2.5.

Later in the show, we chatted about some of the other notable stories and podcasts on The New Stack this week:

• Why Kubernetes Needs to Be Dumbed Down for DevOps
• AWS Well-Architected Framework
• Linux cgroups v2 Brings Rootless Containers, Superior Memory Management
• OAM, the Kubernetes Application Model Bridging Development and Deployment

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack.