📖 In Greek mythology, Talos, was a giant automaton made of bronze to protect Europa in Crete from pirates and invaders. He circled the island's shores three times daily.

Talos Linux

Talos is a container optimized Linux distro; a reimagining of Linux for distributed systems such as Kubernetes. Designed to be as minimal as possible while still maintaining practicality. For these reasons, Talos has a number of features unique to it are, it is: immutable, atomic, ephemeral, minimal, secure by default, and it is managed via a single declarative configuration file and gRPC API.

Talos can be deployed on the following platforms:

• container
• cloud
• virtualized
• bare metal

There are no GNU utilities, no shell, no SSH, no packages, nothing you could associate with any other distribution. It can be said to be the second-generation of container-optimized operating systems, where things like CoreOS, Flatcar, and Rancher represent the first generation. Talos Linux is actually a ground-up rewrite, running the Linux kernel, but everything downstream of that is custom code, written in Go. Things like that the kernel launches machined, not systemd.

Why Talos

In having less, Talos offers more. Security. Efficiency. Resiliency. Consistency.

There is only a cluster. Talos is meant to do one thing:
maintain a Kubernetes cluster, and it does this very, very well.

My Use of Talos

This highly efficient and lightweight OS is my new favorite.

Development and testing

I have Docker Desktop on my Mac and Docker,KVM/QEMU and VirtualBox on my Linux rig and run Talos on them. I run Talos on my Proxmox test cluster.

Production

On my Proxmox clusters. I run Talos for my Kubernetes stuff. Proxmox is a great platform for Talos. Running on real rust is also great.

System Requirements

Hardware requirements for running Talos Linux are similar to that of Kubernetes.

Minimum Requirements

Recommended

Note on Storage

Talos Linux itself only requires less than 100 MB of disk space, but the EPHEMERAL partition is used to store pulled images, container work directories, and so on. Thus, a minimum is 10 GiB of disk space is required, but 100 GiB is desired.

Platforms

Omni for Home

Omni lets you rapidly provision machines and clusters, even on bare metal and at the edge. It handles security for you, integrating Kubernetes access into your Enterprise authentication. Omni automates updates, re-provisioning and Git Ops flows. All through a simple UI or API.

Want to run Kubernetes at home? Omni Hobby plan is only $10 per month for up to 10 nodes for home (non-commercial) use. Limited to a single user, with community support only.

Final notes

Talos is an ideal way of running and maintaining Kubernetes clusters.
It's small enough to run on a PC, but it's easily scalable to a large production platform. For enterprise customers, the Omni is a great tool for productivity.

Next parts are about how to run on a PC and how to run Talos on Proxmox.

References

Talos Distro ^[1] Omni ^[2] Running in Docker ^[3] Talos on Proxmox ^[4]