I’m sure at this point you might have seen the words “k8s” “kubernetes” “cloud native” more than you see the lock screen of your phone, k8s has truly changed the way we build and run modern workloads and it should get complete credit for it, but there are various times when “less is more” thats exactly is the intention of k0s
What is k0s?
k0s is a distribution of k8s built by the good folks who also built lens (highly recommend check this project), it can be used in private, public and edge/IoT location…but wait can’t you run k8s there anyway ? why do you need this new distro, hold your crd’s because I’m going to tell briefly on why this project matters more now than ever
k0s has very low resource need, the whole thing is very easy to bring up and anyone who works with normal linux package can bring the whole thing up, it supports all the latest features of upstream k8s but the size of the whole thing is few MB’s and packaged as single bin, you can checkout the list of features supported in the GitHub page below.It can run on both x86 and ARM but looking at the architecture I wouhld say its best optimized for ARM.
The telco connection
This project is best fit for telco, since the size of the radio and other telco components gets shrinking ultimately vaporising into the cloud this project will help run cloud native workloads on small cells, IoT gateways, WiFi, private deployments etc, the whole thing blends well with your linux and you won’t feel that a alien has invaded your system (no offence k8s)
here are possible things you can do with k0s,
- Pull in a CU or DU APP into the small cell LTE/5G radio when needed.
- Run a neat gateway framework (like matter) in your home gateway.
- Light weight or I would call it “just enough private 5g solutions”
- Run few cloud native apps in the switch.
- Run a piece of controller on the WiFi access points, probably few things can be offloaded to a leader wifi ? or make one node which is less loaded to run few workloads.
- Run a actual RIC inside a small cell maybe.
- MEC use cases where you deploy a ARM solution on the prem and pull in apps on demand.
- CPE or uCPE or vCPE where you get things done with minimal resources.
This project makes lot of sense for telco since most of the low weight to medium application’s are on the way to cloud native road and k8s might be a overkill in lot of cases.
The gibhub page has good demo’s, smoke test, use cases and philisopy behind creating such project.
Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer
Thanks for reading and happy holidays!
