Hello everyone! We have been busy lately in building and packing a modern, OCI-based, immutable yet resilient Linux meta-distribution, called Kairos (you can find the project now at https://kairos.io).
By ‘immutable’, we mean that the system boots up in a read-only mode and cannot be tampered nor modified after installation, and OCI-based means that the system is a standard container image.
Where are we today?
- An evolving concept: The Kairos project started more than a year ago, formally named c3OS. Initially, it was just a meta-distro (based both on openSUSE and Alpine) where you could spin up k3s clusters easily via cloud-init to bare metal, with P2P full-mesh capabilities thanks to libp2p, allowing clusters to stretch up to 1,000 kms!
- A clear roadmap: Today Kairos allows bootstrapping clusters without mesh capabilities, with different providers than k3s and in the future it will support hybrid mesh — that is, leveraging the mesh and ledger functionalities only to bootstrap and automatically configure KubeVIP environments also in local-network only.
- Hitting 1.0: It’s an important milestone, as the project is tested and safe for daily use.
What does Kairos let you do?:
- Onboard other Linux distributions and convert to an immutable system which is fully managed via Kubernetes.
- Create and customize your own OS to suit your needs via Kubernetes native extensions, and in runtime via live layering(not yet, but soon!). Yes, it means using Kubernetes CRDs and interacting with these resources in a Kube-native way!
- Lifecycle management: We are currently working on integrating with Cluster API and providing a complete bootstrap and distributed full lifecycle management experience leveraging the libp2p library that can be packed and started from the ground-up with Kubernetes. This will allow you to build your decentralized cloud with a zero-touch provisioning paradigm.
We have some exciting items in the pipeline such as: Cloud native Edge persistent data encryption , Node auto scaling, Decentralized container registries
… and that’s just the start! Kairos is a completely community-driven project, and the roadmap is accessible in Github, you can also sneak peek and join our office hours to talk to our developers and community.
So: we would love to hear your feedback on our concept and the work we have done and have planned! What do you think about decentralization applied to Kubernetes? What about immutability, data encryption and SLSA? We’re here to help!
You can find Kairos in Github here: GitHub - kairos-io/kairos: The immutable Linux meta-distribution for edge Kubernetes or at https://kairos.io