What is MicroK8s used for?

MicroK8s is a lightweight, single-package Kubernetes from Canonical for developer workstations, edge, IoT and CI/CD, installed as a snap. It is a good fit for local Kubernetes on a developer laptop, and small edge and IoT clusters.

Is MicroK8s open source?

Yes. MicroK8s is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at canonical/microk8s and is written mainly in Python.

Yes. MicroK8s is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host MicroK8s?

Yes. MicroK8s can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is MicroK8s an alternative to?

MicroK8s 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 K3s, Kubernetes and Rancher.

Is MicroK8s actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to MicroK8s was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.36, published on 25 May 2026. The project has 9.4k stars on GitHub.

MicroK8s: open-source alternative to Amazon EKS

About MicroK8s

MicroK8s is a lightweight, fully conformant Kubernetes distribution delivered as a single package. Canonical positions it for developer workstations, IoT, edge deployments and CI/CD, and says it aims to keep administration to a minimum by including all dependencies in one install.

It includes a curated set of manifests for common capabilities, such as the Istio and Linkerd service meshes, Knative for serverless, Fluentd, Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring, ingress, DNS, the dashboard, clustering and GPU bindings for AI and machine learning workloads. A microk8s kubectl command is bundled, and members of a microk8s user group can run commands without sudo. Security updates can be applied immediately or scheduled, and releases track upstream Kubernetes.

MicroK8s is mostly written in Python and is licensed under Apache-2.0. It is installed as a snap on Linux and is intended to be compatible with managed offerings such as Azure AKS, Amazon EKS and Google GKE when run on Ubuntu.

Key features

Single-package conformant Kubernetes
Install as a snap on Linux
Built-in Istio, Linkerd and Knative add-ons
Prometheus, Grafana and Fluentd monitoring
Clustering and GPU bindings
Bundled microk8s kubectl command

Good fit for

→Local Kubernetes on a developer laptop
→Small edge and IoT clusters

Built with: Python; Kubernetes
Tags: kubernetes; k8s; canonical; snap; edge; iot; ci-cd; devops

MicroK8s: questions and answers

What is MicroK8s used for?: MicroK8s is a lightweight, single-package Kubernetes from Canonical for developer workstations, edge, IoT and CI/CD, installed as a snap. It is a good fit for local Kubernetes on a developer laptop, and small edge and IoT clusters.
Is MicroK8s open source?: Yes. MicroK8s is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at canonical/microk8s and is written mainly in Python.
Is MicroK8s free?: Yes. MicroK8s is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host MicroK8s?: Yes. MicroK8s can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is MicroK8s an alternative to?: MicroK8s 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 K3s, Kubernetes and Rancher.
Is MicroK8s actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to MicroK8s was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.36, published on 25 May 2026. The project has 9.4k stars on GitHub.