K8E 🚀 — Instantly Ready Lightweight Kubernetes for Enterprise & AI Workloads

K8E (Kubernetes Easy Engine) is a lightweight, CNCF-conformant Kubernetes distribution engineered for rapid deployment and enterprise-scale operations. Built on the foundation of K3s with strategic enhancements for production environments, K8E delivers a fully compliant Kubernetes experience in a single binary under 100 MB—enabling clusters to be up and running in under 60 seconds.

Get started in 60 seconds:

curl -sfL https://get.k8e.sh/install.sh | K8E_TOKEN=ilovek8e INSTALL_K8E_EXEC="server --cluster-init --write-kubeconfig-mode 644" sh -

Enterprise-Grade Simplicity

k8e eliminates operational complexity without compromising capabilities. It provides:

• ✅ Unified cluster lifecycle management with zero-dependency installation
• ✅ Built-in security hardening and policy enforcement for regulated environments
• ✅ Production-ready HA architecture with embedded etcd support
• ✅ Seamless integration with existing enterprise toolchains and monitoring stacks
• ✅ Minimal resource footprint ideal for edge, hybrid cloud, and cost-sensitive deployments

Native Support for AI Agent Sandboxing

k8e is purpose-built for the AI era, offering first-class support for secure AI agent execution through Kubernetes-native sandboxing:

• Agent Sandbox Ready: Fully compatible with kubernetes-sigs/agent-sandbox, k8e enables secure, isolated execution environments for autonomous AI agents that generate and run untrusted code at scale.
• Stateful Agent Runtimes: Leverages k8e's optimized control plane to manage stateful, singleton agent workloads with persistent identity and storage—critical for LLM agent sessions and tool-use workflows.
• Runtime Flexibility: Supports secure container runtimes (including Kata Containers integration) for hardware-enforced isolation of agent execution environments
• Declarative Orchestration: Deploy agent sandboxes via Kubernetes Custom Resources with fine-grained resource quotas, network policies, and ephemeral workspace management

Why K8E for AI & Enterprise?

While traditional distributions burden teams with operational overhead, K8E delivers production Kubernetes with developer-friendly simplicity—making it the ideal platform for:

• 🤖 AI/ML teams deploying agent runtimes and sandboxed inference workloads
• 🏢 Enterprises requiring certified Kubernetes with minimal footprint
• 🚀 DevOps teams seeking rapid cluster provisioning without sacrificing security

Official Documentation

Acknowledgments

This project is deeply inspired by and references the excellent work of the K3s project. We are grateful to the K3s community for their outstanding contributions to the Kubernetes ecosystem, which have made this project possible.

• Special thanks to K3s - The lightweight Kubernetes distribution that inspired many of the design principles and implementation approaches used in K8E.