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Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Well if you want a nice cheap, small cluster, with HA, and wide community support, and a container model so you have to trust the applications less. What else are you going to use? What else is going to provide a nice easy to use HA raspberry pi that's $100 ish?

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Can containers really improve security in case of IoT where there's a single application that pretty much needs access to the whole device? I think they may only increase the attack surface. High availability seems like an orthogonal problem in case of IoT. It's not like you can spawn more devices. But I acknowledge that it may be just me getting old.

Still happy to learn more arguments for using k8s in IoT (if you are already using k8s then yes, seems like k3s would make sense).

IoT clients consume the entire device. Not necessarily the IoT server. k3s supports containerd on arm7 and provides good isolation. With efficient code you can easily support a web portal, a light weight database, and plenty of logic for IoT type needs. Seems ideal for trusting multiple 3rd parties, like say one company with your thermostat, one for your cameras, and a 3rd for your lights or similar.

I don't think the suggestion for Kubernetes in IoT is to run it on the Things, but for small local servers running services that work with the devices, instead of pushing all that in the cloud.

Not necessarily. I've seen some k8s on IOT industrial use cases where it made sense. Solar power stations were one example, IIRC.

Rancher Employee here: One of the use cases we have been seeing is for stores, factories, oil wells, base stations, wind farms, etc. the apps people are trying to deploy to these now look much more like data center/micro services apps. Kafka, Redis, logstash, etc. K8s is really good for running these in a reliable and consistent way on potentially divergent hardware.

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