CIQ Releases Open-Source Kubernetes Engine Built for AI Clusters
Global – October 31, 2026 -- CIQ has released Stratum Kubernetes Engine (SKE), an Apache 2.0-licensed distribution that packages the roughly ten upstream projects a Kubernetes cluster needs into one signed file for installing, joining, upgrading and maintaining clusters on Enterprise Linux.
CIQ built SKE to cut the upkeep cost that AI workloads add, since training and inference spread across many systems and capacity moves with demand. The company is the team behind Rocky Linux, Fuzzball, Warewulf and Apptainer.
SKE pins and tests every component as one set
SKE builds Kubernetes, etcd, containerd, runc and kube-vip from unmodified upstream source. It adds Cilium for networking and CoreDNS for cluster DNS. Users download the file for their architecture and run stratum up.
The same file then handles four post-install jobs: