RKE2

RKE2 comes from Rancher (acquired by SUSE in 2020) and also goes by the name RKE Government. It is a fully conformant Kubernetes packaged as a single binary, but built around compliance: FIPS 140-2 cryptography, CIS hardening by default, and no Docker — containerd and embedded etcd instead.

Technically it blends two earlier approaches: control-plane components run as static pods (as in kubeadm) while the whole thing ships as one self-contained binary (as in k3s). RKE2 is the security-minded sibling of the lightweight k3s — same stable, different priorities.