The MetalKube project is in its early stage and currently has just six contributors. It not clear yet as to when it might reach release.
Red Hat is working on a tool that would simplify deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters on bare-metal servers.
Steve Hardy, Red Hat’s senior principal software engineer, announced the project, dubbed MetalKube, earlier this week at the Open Infrastructure Days UK – an event organised by the local Open Infrastructure community and supported by the OpenStack Foundation.
MetalKube Documentation on Github reads:
“The MetalKube project exists to provide components that allow you to do bare metal host management for Kubernetes. MetalKube works as a Kubernetes application, meaning it runs on Kubernetes and is managed through Kubernetes interfaces.”
As reported by The Register, the initial implementation of MetalKube is being built with Ironic – one of nearly 50 software modules used in OpenStack – to manage physical server hardware and provision images. It also involves CoreOS and Kubernetes’ custom resource definitions that describe the bare-metal nodes.
Reasons for choosing Ironic
Hardy told the British technology news and opinion website that they chose Ironic because of its active development. When new features get added to Ironic, the MetalKube team gets them “for free”, he said.
OpenStack is a framework consisting of an integration engine and a wealth of interdependent modules or projects, each serving a narrowly defined purpose, like Nova for compute, Neutron for networking and Swift for object storage. Ironic is a vintage module designed to bring automation and speed of provisioning normally associated with virtual machines to physical servers.
The MetalKube project is in its early stage and currently has just six contributors. It not clear yet as to when it might reach release.
“It’s a very, very young project but we are keen to get more community participation and feedback,” Hardy was quoted as saying.
