microk8s

MicroK8s, developed by Canonical, is a lightweight, fully conformant Kubernetes distribution delivered as a single package. It runs on 42 flavours of Linux through the snap package system and targets developer workstations, IoT devices, edge deployments, and CI/CD pipelines. Installation is a single command (snap install microk8s --classic), and the distribution ships with all dependencies included, minimizing setup and administration. A bundled microk8s kubectl command lets you manage the cluster immediately, and the kubeconfig can be exported so an existing kubectl installation works against the cluster. A dedicated microk8s user group is created during installation, granting group members access to microk8s commands without sudo. The base install is a minimal upstream Kubernetes; additional functionality is enabled through the microk8s enable command. Available add-ons cover service meshes (Istio, Linkerd), serverless (Knative), monitoring and logging (Fluentd, Prometheus, Grafana, Metrics), plus ingress, DNS, the Kubernetes dashboard, clustering, automatic updates to the latest Kubernetes version, and GPGPU bindings for AI/ML workloads. The microk8s status command lists enabled and available add-ons, and addon manifests or scripts are located under /snap/microk8s/current/actions. MicroK8s tracks upstream Kubernetes closely, releasing beta, RC, and final versions the same day as upstream, while also letting users stay on any release version from 1.10 onwards. Security updates are available for all security issues and can be applied immediately or scheduled to fit a maintenance cycle. The project is a Certified Kubernetes distribution, and official documentation is maintained on the MicroK8s site, with build instructions available in the repository for contributors.