According to the creators, the goal of this project is to make “cloud computing accessible, collaborative, and delightful for developers.”

The sandbox environment can be used for up to two hours at a time, and developers get access to 4 GB of RAM at any time. Once the two hours are up, the workloads are stopped, but developers can recreate them whenever they choose.

Developers can run multiple projects through Acorn. The Pro version offers collaboration features where developers can invite team members, who can then collaborate across multiple applications and environments. It also includes management tools where users can set role-based access control policies. 

Acorn also provides a set of DevOps tools to handle monitoring, logging, secret management, and cloud management. 

There is also a Dev Mode that enables users to work directly on an application while it is running. Changes can be synchronized in real time, debuggers can be added, and logs can be viewed in this mode. 

Projects created in Acorn are saved as Acorn Images, which are OCI-compliant and work with any registry. These images are identical wherever they are deployed, which cuts down errors and configuration issues. 

“Cloud computing has become increasingly complex for large organizations, let alone individual developers and small teams,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Acorn. “With Acorn, we’ve eliminated that complexity. Users don’t need to be experts in Kubernetes, Terraform, DevOps or AWS to take advantage of the power of cloud computing. Acorn puts the power of the most popular cloud computing solutions at your fingertips. The only question is what you will create from then on.”

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I attended last year’s event and spoke with quite a few executives there to learn what it was all about, and most importantly, how it would help their businesses. Customer centricity is what it’s about now.

Rancher Labs was in the first wave Kubernetes distributions, and has learned what it takes to be more than just a Kubernetes company, Sheng Liang, CEO of Rancher Labs, told me this week.

He explained that Kubernetes is becoming a commodity, offered by all three major cloud providers, making it accessible to all. Rancher offers K3S, a project that Liang said “turns it into a distro suitable for edge… basically anything not in the cloud.’

The company’s multicluster management platform is Rancher, and late last year, the company released a beta of Rio, its application deployment engine designed for DevOps teams.

Going forward in 2020, Liang said Rancher is retooling the management platform to “extend its capabilities to handle huge numbers of clusters, that have to be categorized and managed.” Rancher leverages the service mesh capabilities inside Kubernetes to roll out to smaller numbers, so as not to disrupt all clusters with the rollout. 

The company also will productize its Longhorn container storage solution as part of its Rancher platform. By offering block storage, snapshot and backup, Longhorn will enable you to run stateful applications on Kubernetes, he said. 

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Before k3OS, users of Rancher Labs’ k3s still had to manage the underlying Linux operating system separately, Sheng LIangi, CEO and co-founder of Rancher, told SD Times leading up to the announcement. “We’re combining Kubernetes and our own Linux distribution to manage Linux through Kubernetes,” Liang said. “We treat it as a whole thing. If nodes need to be rebooted, Kubernetes can orchestrate that.” This, he added, decreases the complexity of managing k3s Kubernetes clusters.

k3OS is based on the Ubuntu kernel with tools from Alpine Linux, LIang explained. By combining Kubernetes and Linux, organizations that haven’t been updating the OS because they’re focused on Kubernetes won’t have to worry. “Even rebooting the operating system can cause an outage” in places where Kubernetes and the operating system are decoupled, Liang said. “Kubernetes clusters are supposed to fail one at a time; they’re not meant to be taken down all at once.”

k3OS is particularly well-suited for what Liang called low human interaction platforms, such as edge computing, where resources are constrained. Among the key new features are 10-second boot time that makes k3s immediately available, the enablement of automatic k3s configuration during the boot sequence, and the ability to patch and upgrade the Kubernetes distribution and the Linux distribution through a common set of YAML files, the company detailed in its announcement.

Further, no package manager is required because system services are built into the k3s image; and k3OS supports x86 and ARM64 (Raspberry Pi 3), the announcement said.

The company expects to ship a production-ready product later this year, but said developers interested in trying out the new solution can follow the project at https://github.com/rancher/k3os.

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