Canonical makes MicroK8s highly available

Canonical announced high availability (HA) clustering of MicroK8s, their lightweight distribution of Kubernetes. Already popular for IoT and developer workstations, MicroK8s now gains resilience for production workloads in cloud and server deployments.

High availability is enabled automatically once three or more nodes are clustered, and the data store migrates automatically between nodes to maintain a quorum in the event of a failure. “The autonomous HA MicroK8s delivers a zero-ops experience that is perfect for distributed micro clouds and busy administrators”, says Alex Chalkias, Product Manager at Canonical who provide long-term support and maintenance of MicroK8s.

The datastore which makes this possible is Dqlite, Canonical’s raft-enhanced Sqlite, embedded inside Kubernetes. Dqlite reduces the cluster memory footprint and automates datastore maintenance. MicroK8s can also be configured to use etcd, but Dqlite provides the new high availability feature of MicroK8s.