Canonical Brings HA to MicroK8s Distribution

Canonical today announced it has added an autonomous high availability (HA) clustering capability to its MicroK8s lightweight distribution of Kubernetes that is automatically enabled after three nodes join a cluster.

Alex Chalkias, product manager at Canonical, says the data store for Microk8s automatically migrates between nodes to a maintain quorum in the event of a failure. The datastore that makes this possible is Dqlite, an instance of the SQlite database engine that Canonical has embedded inside its distribution of Kubernetes. MicroK8s also manages its own control plane to ensure application programming interfaces (APIs) remain available.

Alternatively, MicroK8s can also be configured with etcd as its data store, but that sacrifices the high availability enabled by Dqlite and consumes more memory.

This extension to MicroK8s is part of an ongoing effort by Canonical to provide a zero-ops experience across its platforms via a Landscape management framework that makes use of tools such as juju, a model-driven approach to deploying infrastructure as code, and Snap, a framework for both packaging applications and deploying MicroK8s, adds Chalkias.

MicroK8s is designed to be installed anywhere via single command. Initially, Canonical assumed the primary use case of MicroK8s would be on laptops developers employed to build applications. However, IT organizations are now installing lightweight instances of Kubernetes everywhere from edge computing platforms to public clouds as they seek to run cloud-native applications more efficiently, says Chalkias.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic organizations are trying to limit travel as much as possible so HA is especially critical in edge computing environments, adds Chalkia. If a node fails, the edge computing platform can continue to operate until the next regularly scheduled maintenance.

In effect, each edge computing platform running MicroK8s becomes its own micro cloud environment, he notes.

In general, Chalkias says MicroK8s recently passed a 3 million download milestone, with hundreds of new users adopting the platform each day.

Of course, MicroK8s is not the only lightweight distribution of Kubernetes available. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently assumed control over K3s, a distribution of Kubernetes curated by Rancher Labs. That effort is at the moment more focused on shrinking the size of the Kubernetes distribution than on using code to automate the lifecycle management processes across the entire IT estate, says Chalkias. Rancher Labs is in the process of being acquired by SUSE, which provides a distribution of Linux that competes with Ubuntu from Canonical.

It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations may ultimately prefer lightweight distributions of Kubernetes over larger distributions that have additional features and capabilities they made not require. Many organizations may standardize on multiple distributions of Kubernetes because the APIs across those distributions are consistent.

In the meantime, there may come a day when there are more instances of Kubernetes running on edge computing platforms than there are in the cloud. The challenge IT teams need to start addressing now is determining how best to manage what inevitably will become fleets of Kubernetes clusters deployed across an increasingly extended enterprise.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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