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Comment by cat199 | Hacker News Reader

while an 'os for kubernetes' would be interesting, the documentation doesn't seem to really explain how:

"Talos lets you treat the cluster as the machine, so you can focus on your applications instead of managing the OS."

all the examples seem to basically be kubectl, etc. commands with different syntax. How exactly is this an 'operating system' and not 'yet another kubernetes build / deployment utility'?

Maybe it's there. I don't see it from a cursory glance (read: clicked 10-20 pages) of the docs. Or, curmudgeonly old me is expecting the term 'operating system' to mean something else? idk. Happy to be corrected.

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It is basically a Linux distribution which only supports running a single app (k8s). It has a custom init process which only supports running k8s-related processes, with no support for directly running any other services.

It is an "operating system" in the same sense that any other user space combined with the Linux kernel constitutes an operating system, so in the same sense that Android, Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu, etc., are "operating systems".

The idea is that since

- we go to great lengths to make the OS secure and immutable

- we have an API

- we will have automated upgrades

We can allow those who are operating clusters to care far less about the OS. Managing SSH, packages, auditing requirements, etc. at the host layer is a job in itself. We aim to remove that concern and allow you to focus on Kubernetes.

What if it's mainly but not only k8s that you want installed - wireguard for inter-node networking for example, or something to support GPUs/other hardware?

We're working through a plugin system that might allow for things like this. GPUs/other hardware will obviously not be pluggable, but we have had requests for both and we are interested in adding support for them. We have really powerful tooling that makes building kernels with modifications simple.

Is this plugin system going to end up being a package manager?

It is not. The specifics are still a WIP to be honest, but the plugin system will almost certainly have a scope to it.

Thanks for the clarification, I can see the use.

this was not clear (to me anyway) from the docs.

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