Canonical has announced the optimization of MicroK8s, its lightweight Kubernetes distribution.

Started in 2018, MicroK8s has matured into a robust tool favoured by developers for efficient workflows and delivering production-grade features for companies building Kubernetes edge and IoT production environments.

“Optimising Kubernetes for these use cases requires, among other things, some problem-solving around memory consumption for affordable devices of small form factors,” says Alex Chalkias, product manager at Canonical.

As of the MicroK8s 1.21 release, the memory footprint was reduced by 32.5%, as benchmarked against single node and multi-node deployments.

“Canonical is committed to pushing that optimisation further while keeping MicroK8s fully compatible with the upstream Kubernetes releases,” adds Chalkias.

With MicroK8s 1.21, the upstream binaries were compiled into a single binary prior to the packaging making for a lighter package (192Mb) and most importantly a Kubernetes of 540Mb.

This enables users to run MicroK8s on devices with less than 1Gb of memory and still leave room for multiple container deployments, needed in use cases such as three-tier website hosting or AI/ML model serving, explains Chalkias.