Brings enterprise SQL database integration

Nov 14, 2019 15:10 GMT  ·  By

Canonical today announced updates for its MicroK8s Kubernetes deployment to deliver high-availability clustering for edge, multi-cloud, and IoT (Internet of Things).

MicroK8s is an upstream Kubernetes deployment certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and developed entirely by Canonical to run offline on your workstation or edge device for all your development, prototyping, and testing needs. MicroK8s is delivered as a snap, which makes it possible to run all Kubernetes services natively and comes bundled with all the libraries and binaries required.

The latest MicroK8s 1.16 release adds high-availability clustering by integrating enterprise SQL database through Canonical's in-house built Dqlite distributed SQL engine to enable rapid deployment of highly standardized small K8s clusters. Dqlite is designed to reduce memory footprint of the cluster in MicroK8s by embedding the database inside Kubernetes itself.

"The rapid rise of enterprise and edge Kubernetes creates a challenge for corporate IT, with thousands of edge nodes running Kubernetes, and hundreds of cloud Kubernetes clusters," said Stephan Fabel, Director of Product at Canonical. "The next generation of Canonical’s Kubernetes offerings reduce the number of moving parts, and embrace standard corporate SQL databases for Kubernetes data stores, to address the operational consequences of Kubernetes cluster sprawl."

Simplifying the deployment of resilient K8s clusters

With the integration of Dqlite, MicroK8s 1.16 is here to simplify the deployment of resilient K8s clusters, offering Telco and retail Edge applications the support they need to achieve high reliability at very low cost, no matter if they're installed on ARM or x86 appliances like the very popular Raspberry Pi, for which Canonical recently pledge to offer full support, or Intel's NUCs.

Canonical also said that the latest MicroK8s updates and the move to SQL as a data store will help system administrators take full advantage of Kubernetes cluster data thanks to the familiar SQL databases instead of using the etcd distributed key-value store for storing data that needs to be accessed by a cluster or distributed system. Users can download MicroK8s 1.16 from the Snap Store for 42 flavors of Linux.