We have been working with opsZero and Alpha3 Cloud to give you more options to run Kubernetes. Alpha3 provides a dedicated infrastructure environment ideal for many workloads and opsZero provides services and features above the compute layer. This combination of infrastructure, software, and services has resulted in the new Alpha3Kube product which gives you a way to provision turnkey Kubernetes clusters on private infrastructure and with operational support. You are able to provision the server capacity you need and a dedicated Omni installation on Alpha3’s environment to have a ready-to-go ..read more

Get ready for 2 weeks of live streaming Talos Linux installations in a variety of environments. Live streams will be on Sidero Labs on LinkedIn and Sidero Labs on YouTube. You are welcome to participate and follow along with your own installation. If you miss the live stream don’t worry. They’ll stay on our YouTube channel for on-demand viewing. Check out a full list of the streams at https://www.youtube.com/siderolabs/streams and don’t forget to subscribe. The post Talos Linux Install Fest appeared first on Sidero Labs ..read more

About 18 months ago we announced that Talos Linux was officially supported by the good people at Equinix Metal. This involved us working with Equinix Metal to give them every new release of Talos Linux so they could deploy it in their provisioning system. We’ve recently worked with Equinix to drop support for Talos Linux – and this is better for everyone! Sidero Labs now has the Image Factory which generates customized Talos Linux images. Need Talos Linux with the gvisor extension? With DRDB kernel modules built in? The Image Factory lets you specify whatever extensions you need, signs everyt ..read more

Don’t ever let a company tell you what is best for you. Even Sidero Labs. You need to make the best decisions for what you need, and you should know why and when it makes sense to re-evaluate past decisions. We’re not going to tell you Omni is the best and easiest Kubernetes management platform, or that Talos Linux is only distro you don’t have to think about. We’ll let our customers tell you at Taloscon. Amazon EKS is a great option if you’re all in on AWS. But the world has moved past a single cloud vendor. Kubernetes was designed to be an infrastructure agnostic cloud and on-prem managemen ..read more

This is a guest post by Mathias Pius, who has dual experience as a Software Engineer and in Operations & Infrastructure, with keen insights into the unique challenges associated with each discipline, but importantly also the contact point between them. With the pendulum of Cloud vs. On-premises swinging slightly towards on-premises again, some might be considering moving their Kubernetes clusters onto bare metal while nursing their scars from the last time they tried managing their control plane using kubeadm. Others have been using bare metal the whole time, but have been hamstrun ..read more

I know it’s a click bait title, and you clicked it anyway. So let’s just pretend you want to get an interactive terminal on a Talos Linux node. I’m not sure why you’d want to do that—the API is more powerful. But Talos doesn’t have SSH. Not only does it not have the service running—it doesn’t even have the sshd binary on the file system. Whatever the reason, let’s pretend you need a shell “on” the host. Maybe you have too much muscle memory for netstat or maybe you just hate declarative APIs. Perhaps you want to impress your co-workers with your 1337 hacker skillz. Whatever the case may be, T ..read more

Come out to Cidercade in Austin on May 7th at 8 PM to meet Andrew Rynhard and Justin Garrison in person. We’d love to hear what you’re working on and what you’re doing with Talos Linux. We’ll pay for your unlimited game pass, drinks, and food. Cidercade is located at 600 East Riverside Drive Austin, TX, 78704 goo.gl/maps/EYq23pgopX275skY6 Please sign up before coming so we can have a head count and pay for passes. Sign up here The post Sidero Austin meetup – May 7th appeared first on Sidero Labs ..read more

Linux golden images have come and gone in popularity over the years with a variety of different tools. When I was first a sysadmin we would hand craft a VM, sysprep it, and then export a vmdk file. When configuration management tools came out we would hand craft a “minimal” VM, sysprep it, export a vmdk file, and let puppet configure the rest during boot. This wasn’t anti-golden image, but the tools at the time made it hard to manage lots of different images and we could get a lot more flexibility by doing a little post-provisioning configuration. Packer leaned into this approach for creating ..read more

As you’ve probably heard there was a sophisticated back door discovered as part of the liblzma decryption library. This back door is intended to allow a malicious actor to remotely execute code on a system via a special SSH public key. Talos Linux is not vulnerable to this CVE, and does not ship with xz installed. We do use xz utilitiy in our build system, we have reverted back to a non-compromised version of xz utilities out of an abundance of caution. The exploit requires some very specific attributes to be true for it to work, none of which apply to Talos Linux. The main required component ..read more

Talos Linux is an API driven distribution for running Kubernetes. It takes great ideas behind immutable operating systems a step further. It isn’t a container operating system, it’s a Kubernetes operating system. The difference is, Talos is built only to run in Kubernetes. Other minimal distributions, like Bottlerocket, add complexity by supporting multiple workloads and orchestrators. By focusing Talos only on Kubernetes and a declarative API it will greatly reduce the toil required for running a Kubernetes cluster. It can reduce it so much there are only 12 binaries in Talos. Bottlerocket i ..read more