Kairos Meets k0s: A Meta-Distribution for Kubernetes is Born
Up until now, Kairos has shipped with first-class support for k3s out of the box. If you wanted something else? You had to rely on community-powered providers. And let’s be honest, while amazing in their own right, they’ve been… fragmented.
We’ve seen providers emerge for kubeadm, nodeadm, microk8s, and even another flavor of k3s. Each one added the ability to run Kubernetes on Kairos, but they were often self-contained efforts. Most didn’t plug into our cloud-init-style configuration, which meant you had to know your way around their specific setup to get them running. Power users and contributors made them work, but new users? Not so much.
Then there’s the provider-kairos, which offers a consistent configuration layer across setups and makes Kubernetes orchestration a breeze, especially for decentralized, peer-to-peer deployments powered by EdgeVPN. But it had one limitation: it only worked with k3s.
That is… until now.
Enter k0s: The Zero Friction Kubernetes
A few months back, William Rizzo, a CNCF and Linkerd Ambassador, approached us with a pull request and a mission: bring k0s to Kairos with the same first-class integration as k3s.
For those unfamiliar, k0s is a lightweight, CNCF-certified Kubernetes distribution that bundles everything into a single binary. No OS dependencies. No frills. Just Kubernetes, as it should be — simple to run, easy to maintain, and friendly across bare metal, cloud, edge, and IoT. It supports containerd, Kube-Router by default (with optional Calico), and can run anywhere Linux does. It’s perfect for Kairos.
We sat down together and made it happen. This is the magic of open-source: two CNCF Sandbox Projects, Kairos and k0s, coming together to build something bigger than either could alone.
Now, thanks to this collaboration, you can run k0s using the same Kairos-native cloud-init configuration that previously only supported k3s. That means P2P cluster formation with EdgeVPN, full configuration via YAML, and all the DX goodness you’re used to, with a new Kubernetes engine under the hood.
What This Means
Kairos just leveled up.
We’re not just a Linux meta-distribution anymore. We’re taking our first real steps into becoming a Kubernetes meta-distribution.
So meta.
“Wait… Kairos is also a Kubernetes meta-distribution now?” — “Always has been.”
From now on, users don’t have to choose between clean, declarative setups and their preferred Kubernetes flavor. The Kairos provider now supports both k3s and k0s natively. Want to try it? We’ve added examples to our repository showing both side-by-side so you can pick the flavor that suits your use case best.
And it doesn’t stop there. As noted in the recent CNCF blog post, combining k0s’s single-binary simplicity with Kairos’s secure, immutable images is a huge win for edge computing. Together, we’re making it easier to build secure-by-default, production-ready clusters from the ground up.
Try it Today
The k0s integration will be fully stable in Kairos v3.4, but you don’t have to wait. It’s already available in our beta or nightly images for Ubuntu, Rockylinux, and openSUSE, or you can build your own with AuroraBoot.
To get started:
- Check out the Kairos provider repository
- Explore the updated examples with
k3sandk0s - Spin up a custom image
- And let us know what you build!