k3s Certified Single-Node Kubernetes Cluster

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

k3s is a fully conformant, CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution packaged as one self-contained binary. It bundles the entire control plane together with the container runtime, cluster networking, in-cluster DNS, a metrics pipeline, a local storage provisioner and a service load balancer, so a complete working cluster starts from a single service rather than a stack of separately installed components. Standard kubectl, standard manifests and standard Helm charts all work unchanged, because this is real Kubernetes rather than a lookalike. This image delivers it fully installed and configured, so a Ready single-node cluster is running within minutes of launch with no manual assembly.

Unlike a bare deployment, this image treats the cluster boundary as the headline feature, because an exposed Kubernetes API server is total cluster compromise. No cluster credential of any kind ships inside the image: the cluster certificate authority, every client and serving certificate, the service-account signing key, the node join token and the kubeconfig are all destroyed before capture and generated fresh on each instance's first boot, and the build refuses to produce an image if any of them survive. The API server is never opened to the network by default; only the SSH port is. Every component that does not need to face the network is bound to loopback, the default public ingress controller is removed so nothing unexpected listens, and the cluster image set is bundled and checksum-verified on the image so the first boot needs no registry access at all. The operating system ships fully patched with unattended security updates enabled.

Use k3s to run a genuine Kubernetes cluster without the operational weight of a multi-node control plane: development and continuous-integration clusters, edge and branch deployments, single-tenant application hosting, and learning or evaluating Kubernetes on infrastructure you fully own. Administer the node over SSH with kubectl already on the PATH, tunnel the API to your workstation, or deliberately open the API to your own address range as the deployment guide describes. The current release available is k3s 1.36.2.

This is a repackaged open source software product with additional charges for cloudimg support services. k3s is distributed under the Apache License 2.0. cloudimg is not affiliated with or endorsed by the k3s project, the CNCF or SUSE. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them.