Kairos: Immutable Distro for K8s at the Edge (opens in new tab)

(kairos.io)

46 pointsporjo5mo ago17 comments

17 comments

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?

TrueDuality5mo ago

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.

evrflx5mo ago

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.

2 more replies

udev40965mo ago

Is it better than k3s?

1 more reply

tantalic5mo ago

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.

sixarm5mo ago

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.

zobzu5mo ago

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.

candiddevmike5mo ago

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/

thebruce87m5mo ago

I know balena etcher is a different product, but balena do operate in your space too so it seems like an unfortunate name clash.

suralind5mo ago

Nice project. I will forever be spoiled by Talos' simplicity.

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