Project Lightning Talk: K3s Lightning Update - Manuel Buil, Maintainer

This talk presents an update on K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution optimized for IoT edge environments. The speaker, Manuel, a K3s maintainer, shares recent developments, including upgrades to Go 1.25, the introduction of a NYX snapshotter, and enhancements to secrets encryption that allow switching encryption settings post-deployment. He also discusses future plans for improving gateway API consumption, Windows support, and NFTables experience, as well as making K3s ready for DRA to utilize GPUs more effectively. The session encourages community involvement and collaboration, inviting users to share their use cases and contribute to the K3s project.

Good, so I'm Manuel, I'm one of the K3s maintainers, and thanks for coming for to this lightning talk. Um, this is lightning update of what we've been done in the last month, and what we want to do in the next month. So, for the ones not familiar with K3s, K3s is a fully conformant Kubernetes distribution. It's it's very lean because, yeah, we have a binary, you deploy

it, and it doesn't consume a lot of resources. It's simple and fast. You have your Kubernetes cluster running in less than 2 minutes. It's optimized, especially for IoT edge kind of hardware where you don't have a lot of resources, and it's open. We are part of CNCF right now as a sandbox project, um, and we want now to go into incubation. So, if you don't mind asking,

um, can you raise your hand if you're using K3s? Great. So, now let me ask you for a favor. Our adopters list is ridiculously small. So, if you're not shy, please, could you open a PR and and and, yeah, put your name there. It will help us a lot in this process of incubation, for example, and also, um, it gives us a lot of energy to continue

working. Um, yeah. just to give you to give you some some recent development updates, we we moved to go 1.25. Um, we have now a NYX snapshotter. This was contributed by, um, somebody uh, that is now part of the maintainers list. If that person is here, thank you. Um, we enhanced the kind metrics. Kind is a project that allows us to talk to, uh, different databases that

is also part of K3s, and now you can get more information of what's going on. The secrets encryption enablement, like before you had to decide at the beginning when deploying if you wanted your secrets to be encrypted or not. Now, you can you can switch that, um, after deploying it, I don't know, 1 year after. Um, the retention flag for S3 snapshots, before we could you we

we only had that flag for the the snapshots that you create, uh, locally. Now, you will also have it for for S3. Uh, containerd 2.2, very very important 2.2.2, actually. Uh, very important for new feature, especially when it comes to DRA and connecting to GPUs, things like that. And then in our we took a big effort lately, thanks to to Orlin, who is here, being a better

CNCF citizen. So, um, now we have an inclusive naming. We have a security self-assessment that you can check. Um, we have project meetings. We are I think we are pretty open. Um, so don't be scared to to come and into these meetings and and join us. So, these inclusive naming and security self-assessment is just two examples of what we've been doing. Now, what topics we want to

tackle in the next month? We have these rockets that we want to launch. Um, we want to simplify the gateway API consumption. We have users that are complaining because, you know, the gateway API CRDs are not part of core Kubernetes for different reasons, and each project installing a K3s comes with them, and they might have different versions. So, we want to bundle it in a, let's say,

good way. Um, we also want to improve our Windows support. Right now, it's not perfect. We have users that want to do confidential containers, uh, through Kata or others, but, yeah, that's a that's a project we would like to spend some time. The NFTables experience could be better. That's is something that we want to tackle. And, of course, being DRA ready, like DRA to consume GPUs, for

example, in 1.36 is getting better. There are new there two APIs that are GA. So, um, we want to we want to make sure that it works. So, gateway API and NFTables, we already have two maintainers looking into that. For the rest of the topics, we have nobody. If you have some free cycles, if you would like to collaborate, if you would like to contribute to K3s,

you are super welcome to do it. And if you don't know how to do it, find us. We have a country fest session on Wednesday, and we will be at the project pavilion Wednesday morning and Thursday morning. We also have community meetings. This is a QR to reach us. And I'd like to end with asks and favors. Don't be shy. Please, become an adopter if you're using

K3s. And something that we are very curious and we are very excited is if you come to us and explain how you're using K3s. You know, for the maintainers in the room, probably this is a problem that you're having as well. We have like a wall that sometimes is hard for us, uh, to understand how it is being used. And when they tell you about the use

case, you get super excited and super energized. So, um, that would be great if you come talk to us, Orlin, me, other people, and explain how you're using K3s. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you, Manny.