May 2025 – Portainer.io today announced the release of KubeSolo, a purpose-built Kubernetes distribution engineered specifically for far edge environments. Designed to run reliably on ultra-low-power devices, KubeSolo brings the power of modern application orchestration to devices in as little as 150MB of RAM.
Kubernetes has revolutionised the way applications are deployed and managed. But until now, the benefits of Kubernetes have largely excluded one critical segment; the far edge. In environments where devices often operate with 512MB or less of RAM, traditional Kubernetes distributions simply don’t fit. They demand resources that these devices don’t have. That ends today.
KubeSolo reimagines what Kubernetes can be when designed for the edge. It removes the unnecessary overhead of clustering logic that has no place on single-node deployments. No etcd. No SQLite. No kube-scheduler. In their place: a minimal, tightly integrated core with a custom admission controller, finely tuned for predictable, resource-efficient performance.
“KubeSolo was born from a simple question,” said Neil Cresswell, CEO at Portainer.io. “Why should you lose access to the modern application deployment model just because your device is resource constrained? We believe Kubernetes should be accessible everywhere; cloud, datacenter, edge, and now, far edge.”
Key highlights:
- Consumes less than 150MB of RAM
- Fully OCI-compliant
- ARM, ARM64, and x86_64 support
- PVC support
- No clustering components, by design
- Support for Standard Ingress Controllers or Load Balancer Services like MetalLB
- Native fleet management via Portainer Business Edition
KubeSolo is fully open source, available today, and actively maintained by Portainer.io. It is the first Kubernetes distribution specifically designed to power modern workloads in the most resource-constrained edge environments; retail IoT, industrial gateways, smart city sensors, and everything in between.
And when paired with Portainer Business Edition, KubeSolo nodes can be deployed, updated, and managed as part of a secure, scalable fleet, making it the ideal foundation for companies building the next generation of intelligent edge infrastructure.
About Portainer.io
Portainer.io simplifies container and Kubernetes management for enterprises of all sizes. With over 650,000 active users and customers spanning government, defense, industrial, and commercial sectors, Portainer brings clarity, consistency, and control to the container ecosystem.
To learn more and try KubeSolo today, visit https://www.kubesolo.io
