Today’s applications are marvels of distributed systems development. Each function or service that makes up an application may be executing on a different system, based upon a different system architecture, that is housed in a different geographical location, and written in a different computer language.

Servers are expensive. And in single-application installations, most servers spend the majority of their time waiting. Making the most of these expensive assets led to virtualization, and making the most of virtualization has led to multiple options for virtualizing applications. VMware and Docker offer competing methods for virtualizing applications. Both technologies work to make the most of limited hardware resources, but they do so in significantly different ways.

What an amazing first week! I’ve been marketing open source technologies for over 15 years. During that time, I’ve been involved in many new product releases. Nothing comes close to the response we’ve had from k3s – http://k3s.io. Judging by the incredible feedback (including over 4,500 GitHub stars in one week), the release of k3s appears to have landed at exactly the right time.

Enterprises are increasingly pressured by competitors and their own customers to get applications working and online quicker while also minimizing development costs. These divergent goals have forced enterprise IT organization to evolve rapidly. After undergoing one forced evolution after another since the 1960s, many are prepared to take the step away from monolithic application architectures to embrace the microservices approach.

More than 20,000 environments have chosen Rancher as the solution to make the Kubernetes adventure painless in as many ways as possible. More than 200 businesses across finance, health care, military, government, retail, manufacturing, and entertainment verticals have recognized that Rancher simply works better than other solutions.

Inherently, Kubernetes clusters are multi-user. As a result, organizations want to ensure that cross-communication is protected via role-based access control, logical isolation and network policies. A container orchestration system such as Kubernetes brings information technology operations and developers (DevOps) closer together, making it easier for teams to collaborate effectively and efficiently with each other.

Today Rancher Labs is announcing a new open source project, k3s, which is a lightweight, easy to install Kubernetes distribution geared towards resource-constrained environments and low touch operations. Some use cases in which k3s really shines are edge, ARM, IoT, and CI. The work for k3s started as a component of Rio, an experimental project we started last year.

Redis (which stands for REmote DIctionary Server) is an open source, in-memory datastore, often used as a database, cache or message broker. It can store and manipulate high-level data types like lists, maps, sets, and sorted sets. Because Redis accepts keys in a wide range of formats, operations can be executed on the server, which reduces the client’s workload. It holds its database entirely in memory, only using the disk for persistence.

This is the first of a series of three articles focusing on Kubernetes security: the outside attack, the inside attack, and dealing with resource consumption or noisy neighbors.