What is K3s used for?

K3s is a conformant, resource-light Kubernetes distribution packaged as one binary, suited to edge, IoT, CI and development clusters. It is a good fit for Kubernetes on edge and IoT hardware, throwaway clusters in CI pipelines, and small production clusters on ARM devices.

Yes. K3s is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at k3s-io/k3s and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. K3s is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Yes. K3s can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is K3s an alternative to?

K3s is an open-source alternative to Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon EKS include Kubernetes, MicroK8s and Rancher.

Is K3s actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to K3s was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.37.1+k3s1, published on 30 September 2026. The project has 34k stars on GitHub.

K3s: open-source alternative to Amazon EKS

About K3s

K3s is a Kubernetes distribution aimed at places where a full upstream install is too heavy: edge sites, IoT devices, CI pipelines, ARM boards, development machines and embedded use. It is certified as conformant, ships as a single binary of under 100 MB, and is written in Go under the Apache-2.0 license. The project promotes easy installation and roughly half the memory of a stock cluster.

To keep operations simple, K3s wraps Kubernetes and its supporting components in a single launcher, uses SQLite as the default datastore, and also supports etcd3, MariaDB, MySQL and Postgres. It bundles containerd and runc, Flannel, CoreDNS, Metrics Server, Traefik ingress, a service load balancer, network policy enforcement, a Helm controller and a local-path volume provisioner, any of which can be disabled or replaced. It has minimal operating system dependencies, handles TLS certificate management, and keeps the kubelet port closed on workers by tunneling over a websocket.

Key features

Single binary Kubernetes distribution under 100 MB
SQLite default with etcd, MySQL and Postgres options
Bundled containerd, Flannel, CoreDNS and Traefik
Built-in Helm controller and local-path storage
Automatic TLS certificate management
Components can be disabled or swapped out

Good fit for

→Kubernetes on edge and IoT hardware
→Throwaway clusters in CI pipelines
→Small production clusters on ARM devices

Built with: Go; Kubernetes
Tags: kubernetes; k8s; edge; iot; lightweight; containers; arm; orchestration

K3s: questions and answers

What is K3s used for?: K3s is a conformant, resource-light Kubernetes distribution packaged as one binary, suited to edge, IoT, CI and development clusters. It is a good fit for Kubernetes on edge and IoT hardware, throwaway clusters in CI pipelines, and small production clusters on ARM devices.
Is K3s open source?: Yes. K3s is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at k3s-io/k3s and is written mainly in Go.
Is K3s free?: Yes. K3s is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host K3s?: Yes. K3s can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is K3s an alternative to?: K3s is an open-source alternative to Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, Azure Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift. Other open-source alternatives to Amazon EKS include Kubernetes, MicroK8s and Rancher.
Is K3s actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to K3s was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.37.1+k3s1, published on 30 September 2026. The project has 34k stars on GitHub.