Kairos: Immutable Distro for K8s at the Edge
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
kairos.ioTechstory
calmpositive
Debate
30/100
KubernetesEdge ComputingImmutable Infrastructure
Key topics
Kubernetes
Edge Computing
Immutable Infrastructure
Kairos is an immutable Linux distribution for Kubernetes at the edge, sparking discussion around its potential use cases, benefits, and comparisons to other similar projects.
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- 01Story posted
Oct 1, 2025 at 6:26 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Oct 3, 2025 at 11:15 AM EDT
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3 months ago
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ID: 45436148Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:30:18 PM
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With Talos, it's just Kubernetes running on the box. There's no SSH or anything. Yes, it's a Linux kernel running, but you don't have a way of running stuff on the box outside of Kubernetes.
For me, Talos is great. If I'm setting up some boxes for K8s, I don't want to have to deal with admin'ing a Linux box. I don't want to login to the box and run some non-K8s service on it. I just want a K8s node and that's what Talos gives me. I think that's also the experience most people want. It's why people pay AWS, GCS, and Azure tons of money to get hosted K8s nodes rather than a Linux box they need to admin.
This mostly only happened because it was a test cluster where we used usb disks, probably not a problem when one properly provisions.
Otherwise it was great! But it does feel akward not booting into an environment where you have a terminal at first
And if I had to deploy it on bare-metal at work I'd most likely use PXE booting instead of USB.
Alternatively, network booting in some fashion is an option. [1]
[0] https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/reference/configuration/v1alpha1...
[1] https://www.talos.dev/v1.11/talos-guides/install/bare-metal-...
I'm pretty positive toward Talos but if you stray from the happy path, by choice or accident, it can become challenging technically. And then you have sunk costs around choosing this platform and how hard it would be to restart from scratch.
The main reasons to use Kairo are perhaps more around the P2P mesh, using Cloudinit, deb vs rpm etc.
https://etcha.dev/etchaos/