Kairos: Immutable Distro for K8s at the Edge

[klooney]

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?

[TrueDuality]

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.

[tantalic]

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.

[sixarm]

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.

[zobzu]

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.

[candiddevmike]

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/

[thebruce87m]

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

[suralind]

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