Talos The Kubernetes Operating System

  • 26 January 2024
  • 9 comments
  • 115 views

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

I recently stumbled upon Talos. In fact I think @michaelcade 

The web site is here https://www.talos.dev/ 

As it states on the website: https://www.talos.dev/v1.6/introduction/what-is-talos/

“ Talos is a container optimized Linux distro; a reimagining of Linux for distributed systems such as Kubernetes. Designed to be as minimal as possible while still maintaining practicality. For these reasons, Talos has a number of features unique to it:

  • it is immutable
  • it is atomic
  • it is ephemeral
  • it is minimal
  • it is secure by default
  • it is managed via a single declarative configuration file and gRPC API

Talos can be deployed on container, cloud, virtualized, and bare metal platforms.”

I am going to run it in docker so I will turn on my Rancher Desktop, disable K3S and change the container runtime to mobi docker. You can find out more about Mobi here:  https://github.com/moby/moby#readme but suffice to say it is included in Rancher Desktop as an alternative to Containerd. 

Dockerd (moby)
Disable K3S in Rancher Desktop

Rancher Desktop will restart and after that we can download and install the Talos client in WSL Ubuntu: 

curl -sL https://talos.dev/install | sh
Talos

After that we can build our first cluster:

 

talosctl cluster create
The build starts
Done

Taking a tour we see Flannel as the CNI among other things

 

Cluster

As always let’s take it for a quick run

kubectl run nginx --image=nginx

Very security conscious:

 

nginx pod

To get rid of the cluster just type the following command:

talosctl cluster destroy
Destroy Cluster

You can do a lot more with Talos than I did here and I think this will be a subject of many more posts to come.


9 comments

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Yet another cool tool. Thanks for sharing Geoff! 

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Stop posting all these new things man! 🤣

Trying to get to this stuff at some point, so much to learn.  😋

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

I actually cover this on Day 28 of #90DaysOfDevOps in a session and if you would like to follow along in a vSphere environment then I have a walkthrough here. 

 

https://github.com/MichaelCade/Homelab/tree/main/talos-vsphere

 

I was going to write up and share everything next week 

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

I actually cover this on Day 28 of #90DaysOfDevOps in a session and if you would like to follow along in a vSphere environment then I have a walkthrough here. 

 

https://github.com/MichaelCade/Homelab/tree/main/talos-vsphere

 

I was going to write up and share everything next week 

That is great since that will be on a hyper-visor i.e. vsphere!  My example here is just in docker containers which is ok for some tests but restricts you quite a bit, like with KIND (Kubernetes in Docker)

Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Nice! Thanks for the heads up Michael!

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Yeah this is great @Geoff Burke we have been working on something with ContainerCraft to help the community with an end to end build your own HomeLab cloud using Talos and Pulumi 

 

The new HomeLab servers some may have seen on Twitter I got, they have Talos on bare metal I have started two write ups  

 

Talos Linux on vSphere 

Talos Linux on Bare Metal 


We have some audacious goals for this project with virtual machines landing here using the KubeVirt Project  

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

The fact that Talos is immutable is critical. KubeVirt is on my long to do list. 

Getting back to Talos I was wondering around their documentation and am really impressed. Great descriptions covering many of the Kube rabbit holes. An air gapped section too https://www.talos.dev/v1.6/advanced/air-gapped/

Honestly, I think I am going to spin these up in my Promox labs. Alas it will have to wait as I fly off to Arizona tomorrow (However did you get so much done in your lab before when travelling 😁?). 

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Planes have WiFi :) 

Userlevel 7
Badge +22

Planes have WiFi :) 

In fact I am going to purchase that for the first time ever. I was an avid user of the free texting but there comes a time when you must shell out.. plus I think I can expense it since work stuff :)

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