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Introduction

Sidero (“Iron” in Greek) is a project created by the Talos Systems team. The goal of this project is to provide lightweight, composable tools that can be used to create bare-metal Talos + Kubernetes clusters. These tools are built around the Cluster API project. Sidero is also a subproject of Talos Systems’ Arges project, which will publish known-good versions of these components (along with others) with each release.

Overview

Sidero is currently made up of two components:

  • Metal Controller Manager: Provides custom resources and controllers for managing the lifecycle of metal machines, iPXE server, metadata service, and gRPC API service
  • Cluster API Provider Sidero (CAPS): A Cluster API infrastructure provider that makes use of the pieces above to spin up Kubernetes clusters

Sidero also needs these co-requisites in order to be useful:

All components mentioned above can be installed using Cluster API’s clusterctl tool.

Because of the design of Cluster API, there is inherently a “chicken and egg” problem with needing an existing Kubernetes cluster in order to provision the management plane. Talos Systems and the Cluster API community have created tools to help make this transition easier. That being said, the management plane cluster does not have to be based on Talos. If you would, however, like to use Talos as the OS of choice for the Sidero management plane, you can find a number of ways to deploy Talos in the documentation.