Apache Pulsar is a distributed messaging and streaming system. Its unique architecture of compute-storage separation is born for cloud-native environments. As we run Pulsar inside containers in production, we might want to run some tests beforehand. This is also why I tried installing Pulsar on Kubernetes through the KubeSphere App Store in a previous blog. In this blog, I would like to try another way of installing Pulsar in the containerized environment by using K3s.

What Is K3s

K3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution developed by Rancher. It gets rid of some dependencies and components required for Kubernetes. As such, you can run K3s on smaller machines compared with Kubernetes. This also makes it very easy to use for development and testing purposes (you can also scale it for production). If you are new to Kubernetes or are frustrated by its complexity, K3s may be a great alternative to get started.