Rancher Labs‘ Kubernetes distribution K3s is now officially accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project. Launched in February 2019, K3s is a lightweight, production-grade Kubernetes distribution designed for developers and operators looking to run Kubernetes in resource-constrained environments.

K3s joins 33 other early-stage Sandbox projects including Longhorn, a Kubernetes storage solution, which Rancher Labs donated to the CNCF in October 2019.

The CNCF Sandbox provides an avenue for technically exciting projects that are beneficial to the cloud-native community and that the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) believes warrant experimentation. The Sandbox provides a neutral home to foster collaborative development and is the preferred path for early-stage projects to enter CNCF.

“K3s is already benefiting a range of industries – from manufacturing to telecoms – and we are indebted to all those that have contributed to its evolution. By donating K3s to the CNCF, K3s’ value will grow, and its adoption will accelerate. I am excited to see what new use cases emerge in the coming months and years,” quipped Sheng Liang, co-founder and CEO, Rancher Labs.

Rancher Labs said it founded K3s to address the increasing demand for small, easy-to-manage multi-node Kubernetes cluster deployments running on x86, Armv7-A and 64-bit Armv8-A processors embedded in IoT devices or at the Edge.

K3s is a standards-compliant Kubernetes distribution engineered for mission-critical, production use cases.