K2D by Portainer

DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Neil Cresswell and Steven Kang from Portainer to look at K2D, a new project that enables us to leverage Kubernetes tooling to manage Docker containers on tiny devices at the far edge.

K2D stands for Kubernetes to Docker, which is a bit of a crazy idea -- it's a partial Kubernetes API running on top of Docker Engine without needing a full Kubernetes control plane. If you work with very small devices, including older Raspberry PIs, 32-bit machines, maybe industry sensors and the infrastructure we now call 'edge', the container hardware is often hard for you to make simple, reliable, and automated all at the same time.

So this project uses less resources than a single node K3S and still allows you to use Kubernetes tools to deploy and manage your containers, which are in fact just running on a Docker Engine with no full-fledged Kubernetes distribution going on there.

We get into far more detail on the architecture, the Portainer team's motivations for this new open source project and what its limitations are, because it's not real Kubernetes, so it can't do everything.

Be sure to check out the video version of this episode for any demos.

This episode is from our YouTube Live show on March 28, 2024 (Stream 260).

★Topics★
K2D website
K2D Docs

Creators & Guests

• Cristi Cotovan - Editor
• Beth Fisher - Producer
• Bret Fisher - Host
• Neil Cresswell - Guest
• Nirmal Mehta - Host
• Steven Kang - Guest

• (00:00) - Intro
• (02:40) - Introducing the guests
• (03:56) - Why K2D? Architecture and Motivations
• (05:55) - How Efficient is K2D?
• (10:25) - K2D Architecture Explained: Components and Operations
• (20:42) - What Happens When Resources are Exhausted?
• (23:18) - K2D for Edge Deployment with Portainer or Argo CD
• (28:22) - K2D Future Roadmap
• (30:36) - Getting Started with K2D

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