Smooth Sailing with RAIN and k0s

We are proud to share that RAIN, a distributed computing solution supporting industries like manufacturing, utilities, telecom, and retail, has begun to use k0s - a lightweight Kubernetes distro. RAIN leverages multiple Kubernetes distros now, each of which have their own specific use case, and they needed a Kubernetes distro that was lightweight, secure, and easy to get up and running quickly, so they turned to k0s.

k0s is a simple, solid and certified Kubernetes distribution that works on any infrastructure: public and private clouds, on-premises, edge and hybrid. We released the Kubernetes distro in November 2020, roughly a year ago.

Organizations that are evaluating different Kubernetes distros need a unique mix of simplicity, security and modularity. This is where k0s thrives. k0s is broadly applicable for local to large-scale production grade deployments, built to run anywhere and everywhere with no dependencies — and can be deployed in a matter of minutes.

RAIN identified k0s as a potential fit because of its lightweight nature. Their development team needed a Kubernetes distro that could run locally on their machines while ensuring it did not utilize an extensive amount of computing resources. They want to spend as little time as possible configuring and managing Kubernetes clusters and, instead, focus on writing code that provides real value for their customers.

“Some of the AI model calculations that we have in RAIN are quite compute-heavy,” says RAIN’s Director of Engineering, Mikko Suominen. “We want to run those models on GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) rather than CPUs (Central Processing Units). Those two types of processors handle data differently because they have different architectures. While CPUs may be fast at calculus, GPUs are specifically designed to render graphics. It turns out that in this context, graphics and AI models have a lot in common. We quite like the fact that k0s is so easy to deploy and that it enables exposing GPUs smoothly for RAIN to run AI models on them.”

RAIN is a distributed computing solution that enables manufacturing, utilities, logistics, telecom, retail and hospitality organizations…

• To collect, reduce, fuse, process and control any data across any number of information systems – online/offline, in the cloud and on edge devices;
• To create, test, deploy and manage data applications faster, more affordable, more flexibly and with greater ease of use than anything else on the market today.