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Flavors of metal-stack

metal-stack bare metal provisioning offers machines, networks, firewalls and floating IPs. That`s it.

You can consume it as-is with our Plain Flavor or use it as foundation for an orchestrator. We offer two K8s Flavors Gardener and Cluster API.

Plain​

All flavors start with this. This is what you get if you set up metal-stack and stop there.

Using plain metal-stack without additional layer was not a focus in the past. Therefore firewall features and role management are quite basic. There is ongoing work on improved RBAC in MEP-4 and firewall configuration via metal-api in MEP-16.

If you want more features, keep reading.

Gardener​

Gardener is an open-source managed Kubernetes service. It provides a good "batteries-included" developer experience and should be your first choice for a Kubernetes-as-a-service solution.

Gardener is vendor agnostic and can be used with a wide selection of infrastructure providers. One big advantage are its containerized control planes. These allow for control planes to not require three machines for each managed cluster, called Shoot. This makes operating many smaller clusters more economical, compared to bare-metal control planes.

We provide support to run Gardener on metal-stack via Gardener extensions. This integration is production-hardened, well documented, used by many organizations in production and build on top of the open-source project Gardener.

Cluster API​

Our Cluster API integration is a more verbose approach to provide Kubernetes clusters with metal-stack. Our implementation is still in early development. It is based on the Cluster API project.

Configuring Cluster API is very verbose and will be basically unusable for end users. It requires additional tooling to provide a good developer experience. Cluster API will give you building blocks to build a Kubernetes-as-a-service platform on top of it, but no more. We do not recommend you use Cluster API, unless you already have a large platform engineering team, that is very experienced in bare-metal K8s operations and they agree that your specific requirements cannot be modelled with Gardener. In any other case, you will have more success with Gardener.