Why Metal3
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.
Metal3 Components
Enables the creation and management of physical servers using the Kubernetes Cluster API.
Automates the provisioning of bare-metal servers using the open-source Ironic project.
The core component in Metal3 responsible for the provisioning and management of bare metal servers.
Hardware Manager
Acts as a plugin or driver within Ironic to communicate with the underlying hardware resources effectively.
Ironic Image
The container image used to run OpenStack Ironic as part of Metal3
Enables Metal3 to provision bare metal servers with the necessary network configurations