K3s

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It manages containerized applications across multiple hosts, providing mechanisms for deploying, maintaining, scaling, and scheduling workloads. Applications can be configured with YAML and deployed across hybrid-cloud environments; the platform is also used for production operations involving storage, databases, networking, and security hardening.

Kiri is a lightweight container runtime for macOS, Windows, and Linux, developed in Rust as an alternative to Docker Desktop and OrbStack. It runs Docker images and supports the Docker CLI, Compose, buildx, Docker login, amd64 images through Rosetta, and the Docker Engine API. On macOS and Windows it runs containers in a small Linux virtual machine; on Linux it can use the host kernel. Its guest agent starts containers directly with clone3, namespaces, and cgroups, without runc, a shim, or dockerd. Kiri also provides a native interface for containers, images, volumes, and networks, local .kiri.local domains with HTTPS, one-command single-node Kubernetes clusters, and Linux machines. It is distributed for macOS, Windows through WSL 2, and Linux, and is licensed under Apache-2.0; the guest kernel is GPL-2.0.

Talos Linux is a modern, minimal Linux distribution built for running Kubernetes. Developed and supported by Sidero Labs, it is immutable and hardened, with all system management performed through an API rather than a shell or interactive console. API access uses mutual TLS authentication, while immutable infrastructure and atomic updates are intended to reduce configuration drift and support predictable Kubernetes and Linux updates. The project is fully open source and production-ready.

kubeasz is a tool for rapidly deploying highly available Kubernetes clusters. It assembles a cluster from individual components using binary deployments and Ansible playbooks, with both a one-click installation script and step-by-step installation guides for certificates, etcd, container runtimes, control-plane nodes, worker nodes, networking, and cluster plugins. It provides configurable component parameters alongside preset configurations, and can automate a BGP Route Reflector network mode for large clusters. The project supports offline installation, multiple CPU architectures, and several networking implementations, including Calico, Cilium, Flannel, Kube-OVN, and Kube-Router. It is distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

kern is a fast, rootless OCI container runtime, sandbox, and virtual resource runtime distributed as a small static binary without a daemon. It creates kernel-enforced containers from OCI images, using user, PID, mount, network, UTS, and IPC namespaces, overlay or read-only roots, a deny-by-default seccomp allowlist, and cgroup v2 limits; the `--security-profile untrusted` option applies the documented hardened bundle. It can also attach named CPU, memory, disk, and device profiles from `kern.toml` to containers, or apply resource caps directly to host processes with optional Landlock write confinement. The project supports container operations, Dockerfile builds, image pull/push and save/load, stack execution through its own or Docker Compose format, and includes Python and Node SDKs plus an MCP server for agents. Its Rust dependency tree uses libc, while image pulling delegates to system `curl` and `tar`; it runs natively on Linux, requires WSL2 on Windows, and needs a Linux virtual machine on macOS.