Canonical enhances Kubernetes reliability for edge, IoT and multi-cloud

Canonical has announced high-availability clustering for MicroK8s, its workstation and appliance version of Kubernetes. Multi-cloud Charmed Kubernetes has also got an update to support SQL databases as a replacement of the etcd key value store.

The small footprint of Canonical’s MicroK8s makes it suitable for edge devices and laptops. MicroK8s 1.16 added clustering, enabling rapid deployment of highly standardised small K8s clusters. The next step is to ensure high availability of these clusters, using Canonical’s Dqlite distributed SQL engine that is based on the established embedded SQLite store coupled with an implementation of the RAFT cluster protocol. Dqlite removes process overhead by embedding the database inside Kubernetes itself, and reduces the memory footprint of the cluster.

The move to SQL as a Kubernetes data store is mirrored in Canonical’s multi-cloud Charmed Kubernetes that supports relational databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and Postgres, and public cloud SQL offerings like AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). Administrators will be able to use these familiar SQL databases for Kubernetes cluster data instead of etcd.