Deploying Kubernetes to bare metal hardware in your data center has a number of advantages, including increased security, performance, data adjacency, and flexibility. But bare metal deployments have disadvantages compared to the cloud or virtual environments. A wide variety of hardware, storage, and network configurations increase risk, and inadequate tooling means testing and “day 2” operations on bare metal can be slow and hard to automate.

A collection of new open-source tools from Talos Systems based on the Cluster API project aims to solve these problems, and bring the flexibility of cloud-style machine types (m1.small, etc), immutable infrastructure, and fully-automated deployment tools to bare metal environments. We will describe the architecture of these new tools, show a demo of a Kubernetes deployment and a subsequent OS upgrade, and describe our future plans for these tools.