Cluster API Provider Metal3 for Managed Bare Metal Hardware

Kubernetes-native declarative infrastructure for Metal3.

What is the Cluster API Provider Metal3

The Cluster API brings declarative, Kubernetes-style APIs to cluster creation, configuration and management. The API itself is shared across multiple cloud providers. Cluster API Provider Metal3 is one of the providers for Cluster API and enables users to deploy a Cluster API based cluster on top of bare metal infrastructure using Metal3.

Compatibility with Cluster API

CAPM3 version	Cluster API version	CAPM3 Release	CAPI Release
v1alpha5	v1alpha4	v0.5.X	v0.4.X
v1beta1	v1beta1	v1.1.X	v1.1.X
v1beta1	v1beta1	v1.2.X	v1.2.X

Deploying the metal3 provider

The recommended method is using Clusterctl.

Starting from v0.5.0 release of Cluster API Provider Metal3, Baremetal Operator is decoupled from Cluster API Provider Metal3 deployments when deployed via clusterctl. For this reason, Baremetal Operator will not be installed when initializing the Metal3 provider with clusterctl, and its CRDs and controller need to be manually installed. Example flow of installing Metal3 provider:

1. Install Cluster API core, bootstrap and control-plane providers. This will also install cert-manager if it is not already installed. To have more verbose logs you can use the -v flag when running the clusterctl and set the level of the logging verbose with a positive integer number, ie. -v5.

   clusterctl init --core cluster-api:v1.2.4 --bootstrap kubeadm:v1.2.4 \
       --control-plane kubeadm:v1.2.4 -v5

2. Install Metal3 provider. This will install the latest version of Cluster API Provider Metal3 CRDs and controllers.

   clusterctl init --infrastructure metal3

   You can also specify the provider version by appending a version tag to the provider name as follows:

   clusterctl init --infrastructure metal3:v1.2.0

3. Deploy Baremetal Operator manifests and CRDs. You need to install cert-manager for Baremetal Operator, but since step 1 already does it, we can skip it and only install the operator. Depending on whether you want TLS, or basic-auth enabled, kustomize paths may differ. Check operator dev-setup doc for more info.

   git clone https://github.com/metal3-io/baremetal-operator.git
   kubectl create namespace baremetal-operator-system
   cd baremetal-operator
   kustomize build config/default | kubectl apply -f -

4. Install Ironic. There are a couple of ways to do it.

   • Run within a Kubernetes cluster as a pod, refer to the deploy.sh script.
   • Outside of a Kubernetes cluster as a container. Please refer to the run_local_ironic.sh script.

Please refer to the getting-started for more info.

Pivoting ⚠️

Starting from v0.5.0 release of Cluster API Provider Metal3, Baremetal Operator is decoupled from Cluster API Provider Metal3 deployments when deployed via clusterctl. For that reason, when performing clusterctl move, custom objects outside of the Cluster API chain or not part of CAPM3 will not be pivoted to a target cluster. An example of those objects is BareMetalHost, or user created ConfigMaps and Secrets which are reconciled by Baremetal Operator. To ensure that those objects are also pivoted as part of clusterctl move, clusterctl.cluster.x-k8s.io label needs to be set on the BareMetalHost CRD before pivoting. If there are other CRDs also need to be pivoted to the target cluster, the same label needs to be set on them.

All the other objects owned by BareMetalHost, such as Secret and ConfigMap don't require this label to be set, because they hold ownerReferences to BareMetalHost, and that is good enough for clusterctl to move all the hierarchy of BareMetalHost object.

Development Environment

There are multiple ways to setup a development environment:

• Using Tilt
• Other management cluster
• See metal3-dev-env for an end-to-end development and test environment for cluster-api-provider-metal3 and baremetal-operator.

API

See the API Documentation for details about the objects used with this Cluster API provider. You can also see the cluster deployment workflow for the outline of the deployment process.

Architecture

The architecture with the components involved is documented here

E2E test

To trigger e2e test on a PR, use the following phrases:

On main branch:

• /test-ubuntu-e2e-main runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch main on Ubuntu
• /test-centos-e2e-main runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch main on CentOS

Or use parallel for faster tests. Note that these tests run in multiple VMs by creating an independent VM for each test spec:

• /test-ubuntu-e2e-parallel-main runs e2e parallel tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch main on Ubuntu
• /test-centos-e2e-parallel-main runs e2e parallel tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch main on CentOS

Release-1.2 branch:

• /test-ubuntu-e2e-release-1-2 runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch release-1.2 on Ubuntu
• /test-centos-e2e-release-1-2 runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch release-1.2 on CentOS

Release-1.1 branch:

• /test-ubuntu-e2e-release-1-1 runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch release-1.1 on Ubuntu
• /test-centos-e2e-release-1-1 runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1beta1 and branch release-1.1 on CentOS

Release-0.5 branch:

• /test-ubuntu-e2e-release-0-5 runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1alpha5 and branch release-0.5 on Ubuntu
• /test-centos-e2e-release-0-5 runs e2e tests with CAPM3 API version v1alpha5 and branch release-0.5 on CentOS

Upgrade tests:

• /test-upgrade-e2e-main runs e2e upgrade tests from CAPM3 API version v1alpha5/branch release-0.5 to CAPM3 API version v1beta1/branch main on Ubuntu

More info about e2e test can be found here