[HN Gopher] Kairos: Immutable Distro for K8s at the Edge
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Kairos: Immutable Distro for K8s at the Edge
Author : porjo
Score : 44 points
Date : 2025-10-01 10:26 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (kairos.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (kairos.io)
| klooney wrote:
| https://kairos.io/docs/reference/faq/ I was wondering how it
| compares to Talos and now I'm confused. Is it basically a
| bootloader+host kernel shim and nothing else?
| TrueDuality wrote:
| That is also what I came here to find out. Would love to hear
| from the creators of the project how it compares and contrasts
| to Talos. We've been running Talos for a few bare-metal and
| air-gapped cluster deployments with pretty good success but do
| have some pain-points.
| udev4096 wrote:
| Is it better than k3s?
| mdasen wrote:
| It's very different from k3s. With k3s, you have a Linux
| installation like Debian or Fedora and you install k3s on
| it. You can SSH into the box, install any other Linux
| program not running in Kubernetes, etc. It also means that
| you need to run security updates and all the other stuff
| that goes along with administering a Linux box.
|
| With Talos, it's just Kubernetes running on the box.
| There's no SSH or anything. Yes, it's a Linux kernel
| running, but you don't have a way of running stuff on the
| box outside of Kubernetes.
|
| For me, Talos is great. If I'm setting up some boxes for
| K8s, I don't want to have to deal with admin'ing a Linux
| box. I don't want to login to the box and run some non-K8s
| service on it. I just want a K8s node and that's what Talos
| gives me. I think that's also the experience most people
| want. It's why people pay AWS, GCS, and Azure tons of money
| to get hosted K8s nodes rather than a Linux box they need
| to admin.
| evrflx wrote:
| Would love to hear about the pain points: Please elaborate,
| as I am currently in the decision phase and Talos as of now
| the top contender.
| dachrillz wrote:
| Not OP, but when we tested it out it was painful to handle
| usb disks. The reason being that if you have two they get
| named sda/sdb randomly. We managed to overwrite the usb we
| were using to install talos since that one was named sda
| one boot and sdb the next. This lead ut to develop the
| "pullout technique" when installing...
|
| This mostly only happened because it was a test cluster
| where we used usb disks, probably not a problem when one
| properly provisions.
|
| Otherwise it was great! But it does feel akward not booting
| into an environment where you have a terminal at first
| vizzier wrote:
| This does sound like it could be solved with better
| installDiskSelectors[0]. Talos has done a fair bit of
| work in improving this and UserVolumeConfigs in the last
| couple of 1.x revisions.
|
| Alternatively, network booting in some fashion is an
| option. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/reference/configuration/v
| 1alpha1...
|
| [1] https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/talos-
| guides/install/bare-metal-...
| INTPenis wrote:
| I recognize this from my bare-metal homelab setup. But at
| work we used VMs for Talos nodes so this was not an
| issue.
|
| And if I had to deploy it on bare-metal at work I'd most
| likely use PXE booting instead of USB.
| askedrelic wrote:
| It's an opinionated vertical platform; if you run into an
| edge case, bug, or functionality you don't like, you are
| have to open a discussion Github and wait for a new release
| to fix or change things. The devs are very responsive, but
| the same as any open source tool, it's their project. It
| perhaps depends on how much customization you want to do -
| GPUs and drivers, custom CNI, very specific disk settings.
| I've had more trouble with bare metal systems with varied
| hardware vs their supported cloud platforms, which are
| approved and tested.
|
| I'm pretty positive toward Talos but if you stray from the
| happy path, by choice or accident, it can become
| challenging technically. And then you have sunk costs
| around choosing this platform and how hard it would be to
| restart from scratch.
| tantalic wrote:
| I'm (still) very interested about this project. Two years ago, I
| came across this when setting up a Raspberry Pi based "home lab"
| Kubernetes cluster (https://github.com/tantalic/shaving-yaks). I
| ran into some issues (I believe all Raspberry Pi specific) and
| ended up going with k0s. While I am happy with k0s, I do wish
| Kairos worked out for me and I might have to give it a try again
| soon.
| sixarm wrote:
| Been successful using Kairos to build and deploy an immutable
| RHEL9 to environments without internet access. Appreciate the
| flexibility to work with different distros and the maintainers
| provide great support.
| zobzu wrote:
| RH also provides immutable OSes (Kairo uses some of their
| stuff) via Fedora Atomic and Fedora CoreOS, so for a single
| RHEL-like immutable instance, i'd just go CoreOS or Kinoite
|
| The main reasons to use Kairo are perhaps more around the P2P
| mesh, using Cloudinit, deb vs rpm etc.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| We faced a similar need and wanted something more "familiar". We
| built EtchaOS as an in-memory, immutable variant of popular
| distributions like Debian, bundled with Docker and containerd,
| and powered by an imperative, stateful configuration management
| tool (Etcha):
|
| https://etcha.dev/etchaos/
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I know balena etcher is a different product, but balena do
| operate in your space too so it seems like an unfortunate name
| clash.
| suralind wrote:
| Nice project. I will forever be spoiled by Talos' simplicity.
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