Ultra-lightweight, OCI-compliant, single-node Kubernetes built for constrained environments. No clustering. No etcd. Just what you need to run real workloads on real hardware.

KubeSolo is designed for devices at the farthest layer of the network, such as IoT, IIoT, and embedded systems. The image illustrates the three main layers of modern distributed infrastructure:

1. Cloud (Data Centers) Scale: Thousands of nodes Examples: Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, VMware Tanzu, Sidero Purpose: Centralized, large-scale compute and storage
2. FOG (Distributed Nodes) Scale: Millions of nodes Examples: K3s, MicroK8s, Sidero, K0S Purpose: Distributed compute closer to the edge, often for latency-sensitive or regional workloads
3. Edge (Devices) Scale: Billions of devices Example: KubeSolo Purpose: Ultra-lightweight Kubernetes for resource-constrained environments (IoT gateways, industrial controllers, smart devices, etc.) KubeSolo sits at the very bottom of this stack, providing a simple, single-node Kubernetes experience for the edge, where minimal resources and offline operation are critical.

KubeSolo is a production-ready single-node Kubernetes distribution with the following changes:

• It is packaged as a single binary
• It uses SQLite (via Kine) as the default storage backend
• It wraps Kubernetes and other components in a single, simple launcher
• It is secure by default with reasonable defaults for lightweight environments
• It has minimal OS dependencies (just a sane kernel and cgroup mounts needed)
• It eliminates the need for complex multi-node setup by providing a single-node solution

KubeSolo bundles the following technologies together into a single cohesive distribution:

• containerd & runc for container runtime
• CoreDNS for DNS resolution
• Kine for SQLite-based storage

KubeSolo is designed to be a single-node Kubernetes distribution, hence the "Solo" in the name. It's meant to be simple, lightweight, and perfect for development, testing, or small production workloads that don't require the complexity of a multi-node cluster.

No, it's a distribution. A fork implies continued divergence from the original. This is not KubeSolo's goal or practice. KubeSolo explicitly intends not to change any core Kubernetes functionality. We seek to remain as close to upstream Kubernetes as possible by leveraging the k3s forked Kubernetes. However, we maintain a small set of patches important to KubeSolo's use case and deployment model.

There are three major ways that KubeSolo is lighter weight than upstream Kubernetes:

• The memory footprint to run is smaller
• The binary, which contains all the non-containerized components needed to run a cluster, is smaller
• The Kubernetes Scheduler does not exist, instead, it is replaced by a custom Webhook called NodeSetter

The memory footprint is reduced primarily by:

• Running many components inside of a single process
• Using SQLite instead of etcd
• Optimizing resource limits for single-node usage
• Replacing the Kubernetes Scheduler with NodeSetter

KubeSolo is designed specifically for IoT or IIoT devices, such as embedded systems, which typically lack internet connectivity. To address this limitation, KubeSolo is equipped with all the necessary components to ensure it is offline ready.

# Download and install KubeSolo
curl -sfL https://get.kubesolo.io | sudo sh -

A kubeconfig file is written to /var/lib/kubesolo/pki/admin/admin.kubeconfig and the service is automatically started.

Note: If you’re running KubeSolo on a device with less than 512MB of RAM, it’s strongly advised to interact with KubeSolo using the kubectl command-line tool installed externally.

KubeSolo supports the following command-line flags:

Example:

To config KubeSolo to use Portainer Edge, you can use the following command:

curl -sfL https://get.kubesolo.io | KUBESOLO_PORTAINER_EDGE_ID=your-portainer-edge-id KUBESOLO_PORTAINER_EDGE_KEY=your-portainer-edge-key sudo -E sh

Please see the documentation for complete documentation.

GitHub Issues - Submit your issues and feature requests via GitHub.

KubeSolo maintains pace with upstream Kubernetes releases but rely on the forked version from k3s. Our goal is to release patch releases within one week, and new minors within 30 days.

TBC

Security issues in KubeSolo can be reported by sending an email to security@portainer.io.

KubeSolo and the KubeSolo logo are registered trademarks of Portaner.io Limited