Canonical has announced that it will now provide high-availability clustering in MicroK8s. It also announced the integration of enterprise SQL databases in Charmed Kubernetes.
“The rapid rise of enterprise and edge Kubernetes creates a challenge for corporate IT, with thousands of edge nodes running Kubernetes, and hundreds of cloud Kubernetes clusters,” said Stephan Fabel, director of product at Canonical. “The next generation of Canonical’s Kubernetes offerings reduce the number of moving parts, and embrace standard corporate SQL databases for Kubernetes data stores, to address the operational consequences of Kubernetes cluster sprawl.”
MicroK8s is a workstation and appliance Kubernetes that is used for edge devices and laptops due to its small footprint, according to Canonical. MicroK8s 1.16 added clustering, and now Canonical is enabling high availability of those clusters. This is done through the Dqlite distributed SQL engine, which removes process overhead by embedding the database inside Kubernetes and reduces the memory footprint of the cluster.
Canonical also now offers an enterprise SQL database integration for Charmed Kubernetes. Administrators will be able to embrace corporate databases, like Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and more, for Kubernetes cluster data, rather than etcd. “We retain etcd for those users who are comfortable with it,” said Fabel, “but enabling the standard enterprise database set makes it easier for many IT teams to operate K8s.”
