
u/xrothgarx

Sidero Labs AMA
Come ask questions from engineering, product, leadership and more!
Don't forgot to sign up for TalosCon to ask questions in person https://taloscon.com
Introducing Talos Enterprise Linux
This is for Enterprise customers that need Enterprise support and FIPS builds for regulated environments. We started this work last year and released it GA today.
Talos Linux remains MPL licensed and completely open source.
Goodbye 👋
I don't want my money to support companies who support racists. Digital Ocean giving money to DHH and the Omarchy foundation is enough for me to say goodbye.
How are people managing 100s–1000s of on-prem/edge Kubernetes clusters?
​
We’re at ~100 customer-site clusters today and trying to avoid painting ourselves into a corner if that grows to 1k+.
Mostly small clusters, some single-node, some HA. Linux containers only. Connectivity varies a lot: fully connected, heavily whitelisted, or only online occasionally.
We already use Argo CD and prefer GitOps/IaC. Licensing should ideally stay OSS/free.
Currently looking at Rancher/RKE2, Talos, KubeOne/Kubermatic, Fleet, Sveltos, etc.
Curious what people actually run in production for this kind of setup:
- cluster provisioning/lifecycle/upgrades
- central vs per-cluster Argo CD
- handling disconnected/restricted sites
- per-customer config/secrets isolation
- what becomes painful once you get into the 100s or 1000s of clusters
Not really looking for vendor pitches, more interested in what has worked (or failed) in real deployments.
Edit: Same application, maybe some different Versions.
Talos - How to provision a cluster from code instead of CLI?
I'm new to Talos so bear with me. I created a simple local cluster, cool:talosctl cluster create docker
Preferably, I want to configure a yaml file or such and create a pipeline which patches changes automatically. I just checked talhelper but it's archived since last week: https://github.com/budimanjojo/talhelper. I do see other community solutions. It feels however like I'm missing something but my knowledge is limited. What do teams / enterprises use in production to provision clusters and patches from pipeline?
NVIDIA gpu-operator official support
Hey everyone,
I'm trying to get some official recognition from NVIDIA that Talos is a great OS for running GPU accelerated workloads. If you have a moment we'd love a 👍 on this issue to let NVIDIA know there are people interested.
Making my homelab fully “IaC”, I have some questions.
I’m rebuilding my homelab from scratch using Infrastructure as Code.
At this point, OpenTofu is provisioning all of my Proxmox VMs, and I’m using Talos OS for Kubernetes. The infrastructure side is working, and I’m now at the stage where I need to bootstrap the cluster itself.
This is where I’m unsure about the “proper” approach.
My plan is to have Argo CD to manage everything inside Kubernetes, but something has to get me from a fresh Talos cluster to an operational Argo CD installation. My initial thought was to have a bootstrap script that installs/configures the essentials (for example, Cilium and Argo CD via Helm), after that Argo CD takes over. However, I’m wondering if there’s a cleaner or more idiomatic approach.
For those of you running GitOps-first homelabs or production clusters:
How do you bootstrap a brand-new cluster?
Do you use a one-time script, OpenTofu/Terraform providers, Helm, or something else?
Where do you draw the line between infrastructure provisioning and GitOps?
Thanks for any and all input/insight! It was much fun learning IaC / opentofu up to this point
My fully 3D-printed 10-inch rack minilab!
I bought a 3D printer mostly just to pull off this project 😅
Here are the specs for my home setup:
NAS: TrueNAS Community Edition (2x10TB main pool, 2x3TB backup pool, 64GB DDR4 RAM)
Compute Cluster: 3x HP Mini PCs (1x EliteDesk, 2x ProDesks) with i5-8500T CPUs and 32GB RAM on each node.
Hypervisor & K8s: Running a Proxmox cluster with a 3-node Talos Linux Kubernetes cluster inside, plus a few extra VMs.
Networking: TP-Link TL-SG105-M2 2.5 Gbps switch.
If you want a deeper look into the Kubernetes setup, I’ve documented it on GitHub: https://github.com/zarnautovic/kubernetes-homelab
edit:
Here are some 3d models i use to make this:
rack: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2139130-kws-rack-v-2-heavy-duty-10-inch-homelab-rack#profileId-2317125
hot swap bays: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2689222-hot-swappable-10-rack-drive-tray-2-5u-w-cradle#profileId-2979462
panel for atx psu: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1395747-10-inch-rack-mount-panel-for-the-atx-psu-2-ssd?from=search#profileId-1446712
mini itx motherboard: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2452767-2u-mini-itx-motherboard-pc-rack-tray-10-rack?from=search#profileId-2692953
mini pc mount: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1618704-hp-prodesk-mini-g3-4-5-10-rack-mount?from=search#profileId-1710049
switch mount: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1990494-tp-link-tl-sg105-m2-2-5g-10-inch-rack-mount?from=search#profileId-2142070
patch pannel: https://makerworld.com/en/models/825894-10-inch-keystone-patchpanel-x10-ports?from=search#profileId-769490
RAM prices aren't coming down, but upgrade was long overdue
Long time reader, first time poster
Finally decided to pull the plug and rebuild my homelab before RAM and storage prices get any higher than they are now, as they sure don't seem to be coming down.
Biggest struggle was consolidation of storage into a dedicated NAS machine: I moved disks into it from my TrueNAS VM and a QNAP 4-bay NAS, plus some Exos X20 fell off the truck. That required doing a full copy of both my previous zpools back and forth to change the topology.
Sitting very comfortably now at 100TB usable of spinning rust, and 56TB of QLC flash, plus a DB machine for ClickHouse and a big data research hobby with 10TB usable SAS TLC flash. All acquired before the price hike, just never got around to building new machines to put this stuff into, but now I'm afraid that a drive failure will be my ticket to bankruptcy :D
Besides the storage, the whole lab underwent a major overhaul: my previous setup was one Proxmox machine that did everything, including TrueNAS in a VM with a controller passed through. It did well, but the RAM and CPU budget became tight. Plus, I've switched into a KubeOps role a few years back, and now this lonely Proxmox machine was getting neglected a bit, as maintaining it required extra effort on top of my day job.
I wanted to play around with Talos Linux for a while, so that's what I went with. I've restored everything I've set up over the years in about a week, and a few more weeks worth of evenings and weekends were spent fixing small issues with baremetal storage, networking, and VPN (I switched to Netbird from bare Wireguard).
I'll definitely say that the Kubernetes-first approach to homelabbing with such a minimal distro is a bit unique, and I would be reluctant to recommend it, unless you are a sicko like myself and do genuinely enjoy tinkering with Kubernetes. Networking is especially fun.
Now I'm a proud owner of a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster at home, consisting of whoping three computers: NAS, Database box, and the older homelab server, serving as a controlplane now.
And that's way more headroom than I know what to do with, but this is a nice problem to have!
Next project is definitely the networking upgrade, 1Gi worked fine with only the client traffic going through it, but as a cluster network backplane it's very tight...
P.S I also do astrophotography, and this is the biggest storage hog on the HDDs among the data I can't just refetch. Shameless plug, if that's allowed :)
P.P.S AI was used in creation of the gallery website, haha.
A CI/CD app that works with Talos Linux
Hello,
I'm managing at least 10 Kubernetes clusters with the help of Talos Linux. To deploy applications, I use FluxCD which do perfectly the job. Now, I want to deploy a CI/CD pipeline software that will allow me to run various pipelines like image build and push to a repo and especially Ansible playbooks that need to be run periodically on some clusters.
Currently, a pretty barebones Helm Chart that only deploys a lot of cronjobs under a cronjobs: array is used but I believe it is not the good way and it will be tedious to manage it the more we add cronjobs.
I tried to deploy Concourse CI on Talos Linux with the official Helm Chart but something something with the OS container runtime doesn't work properly with Concourse even with the notorious label on the namespace to run privileged workloads for Talos and workarounds around it seems really tedious to do it on production clusters (https://github.com/concourse/concourse/pull/8791)
I wanted to deploy Concourse because it looks more simple and other IT teams could write easily their pipeline files with it.
I'm trying to find other solutions but since I have a lot of tasks to do, I lack some time to review some new apps that could fill this role.
So, do you know if there is a CI/CD application that works on Talos Linux?
Thanks.
EDIT: For all clusters, FluxCD sync resources from a GitLab Cloud repository, if it can help
Could NixOS be an alternative to Kubernetes at a Homelab?
I was seeing a video from Wolfgang where he was explaining his homelab and how NixOS is used. I´m very inclined towards using it on my desktop computer, but I never really thought on using it at the server.
My homelab runs on a single node with Talos Linux, which is a Kubernetes distribution. Everything started quite simple, but now I have 10k lines of YAML. I use Kubernetes on my day job, but to some extend, it feels too much at my homelab. I dont want HA, scaling, and nothing like that. But I do appreciate how easy it is to drop things like gVisor and run containers with more safety, Cillium that allows me to control all the network, etc...
So now I m on this situation that I would like to have something simpler, and maybe NixOS is this solution for me since I already want to use it at my desktop, or stick with Kubernetes complexity.
If I get into NixOS my plan would be to run every service on its own user, although I think gVisor is still way more secure since it exposes just a few syscalls.
The big question for me is how to control the network how I do at Cillium where I allow only access to the internet, or a given service, or a given protocol, domain, etc... Maybe this will be a stretch.
[USA-CA][H] Framework 13" laptop chassis with dongles and wifi [W] Paypal, Local Cash
Timestamps: https://imgur.com/a/4GfGdCZ
Local: 91786, Southern California for pickup or willing to ship within US 48 states
Used Framework 13" laptop chassis. No mainboard, CPU, RAM, or storage. Some wear on the lower frame. Comes with 3x USB-C adapters, 1x WiFi 6 adapter (standard with framework), 1x HDMI adapter.
Does not come with charging cables or power adapter.
Asking $300
Converted my Laptop 13 to a homelab server
It’s an easy build if you do it in the correct order