Metal³ (pronounced “metal cubed”) is an open-source project that provides a set of tools for managing bare-metal infrastructure using Kubernetes.
Mission
The Metal3 Project's mission is to empower organizations with a flexible, open-source solution for bare metal provisioning that combines the benefits of bare metal performance with the ease of use and automation provided by Kubernetes.
Goals
There are a number of great open source tools for bare metal host provisioning, including Ironic. Metal³ aims to build on these technologies to provide a Kubernetes native API for managing bare metal hosts via a provisioning stack that is also running on Kubernetes. We believe that Kubernetes Native Infrastructure, or managing your infrastructure just like your applications, is a powerful next step in the evolution of infrastructure management.
The Metal³ project is also building integration with the Kubernetes cluster-api project, allowing Metal3 to be used as an infrastructure backend for Machine objects from the Cluster API.
These components integrate seamlessly to leverage the Kubernetes ecosystem and automate the provisioning and management of bare-metal infrastructure.
Kubernetes has become the de-facto industry standard for container orchestration. It provides the required abstraction for efficiently managing large-scale containerized applications with declarative configurations, an easy deployment mechanism, and both scaling and self-healing capabilities.
As with any system, logs help engineers gain observability into containers and the Kubernetes clusters they’re running on and the key role they play is evident in a lot of incidents featuring Kubernetes failures. Yet Kubernetes poses a set of unique logging challenges.
containerd is available as a daemon for Linux and Windows. It manages the complete container lifecycle of its host system, from image transfer and storage to container execution and supervision to low-level storage to network attachments and beyond.
The cloud native landscape can be complicated and confusing. Its myriad of open source projects are supported by the constant contributions of a vibrant and expansive community. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has a landscape map that shows the full extent of cloud native solutions, many of which are under their umbrella.
As a CNCF ambassador, I am actively engaged in promoting community efforts and cloud native education throughout Canada. At CloudOps I lead workshops on Docker and Kubernetes that provide an introduction to cloud native technologies and help DevOps teams operate their applications.
I also organize Kubernetes and Cloud Native meetups that bring in speakers from around the world and represent a variety of projects. They are run quarterly in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Quebec City. Reach out to me @archyufaor email CloudOps to learn more about becoming cloud native.
In the meantime, I have written a beginners guide to the cloud native landscape. I hope that it will help you understand the landscape and give you a better sense of how to navigate it.
NATS Server is a simple, high performance open source messaging system for cloud native applications, IoT messaging, and microservices architectures.