For quite some time, Portainer has offered the ability to build MicroK8s clusters directly from within the Portainer UI. That feature is now entering deprecation and will be removed in the next Long-Term Support release.

So why the change? The short answer is that the Kubernetes landscape has shifted, and our strategy has shifted with it. Canonical themselves are pivoting away from MicroK8s in favor of their new Canonical Kubernetes distribution, which is built on ClusterAPI rather than the MicroK8s CLI that our integration relied on. Alongside this shift, we have seen reports from enterprise customers of instability in MicroK8s clusters, with many of them eventually migrating to alternate distributions as a result. And while support for MicroK8s has been present in Portainer for years, adoption has remained low, making it difficult to justify ongoing enhancements to a feature that was only lightly used.

At the same time, we have made a deliberate strategic decision to partner with Sidero Labs. Through this partnership we now support Talos OS and the Vanilla upstream Kubernetes that it provisions. This approach is far more integrated and resilient, since Talos is an operating system designed for Kubernetes from the ground up. Unlike MicroK8s, which required you to provision and configure a full server with SSH access before layering Kubernetes on top, Talos starts at the OS layer, offering a cleaner and more unified experience.

What does this mean in practice? If you’ve provisioned MicroK8s clusters from within Portainer, that capability is going away. You will still be able to manage any Kubernetes cluster through Portainer, including MicroK8s, but you will no longer be able to provision or update MicroK8s clusters directly from our UI once this removal takes effect.

Our focus is to provide you with a stable, future-ready, and enterprise-aligned experience. Moving forward, Talos-backed Kubernetes clusters represent that path, and our roadmap is aligned accordingly.