The Cluster API Control Plane Provider Talos (CACPPT) is a project by Sidero Labs that provides a Cluster API(CAPI) control plane provider for use in deploying Talos Linux-based Kubernetes nodes across any environment. Given some basic info, this provider will generate control plane configurations for a given cluster and reconcile the necessary custom resources for CAPI to pick up the generated data.

There are a few corequisites and assumptions that go into using this project:

• Cluster API
• Cluster API Bootstrap Provider Talos
• Cluster API Provider Metal (optional)

This provider's versions are compatible with the following versions of Cluster API:

This provider's versions are able to install and manage the following versions of Kubernetes:

This provider's versions are compatible with the following versions of Talos:

This control plane provider can be installed with clusterctl:

clusterctl init -c talos -b talos -i <infra-provider-of-choice>

If you encounter the following error, this is caused by a rename of our GitHub org from talos-systems to siderolabs.

$ clusterctl init -b talos -c talos -i sidero
Fetching providers
Error: failed to get provider components for the "talos" provider: target namespace can't be defaulted. Please specify a target namespace

This can be worked around by adding the following to ~/.cluster-api/clusterctl.yaml and rerunning the init command:

providers:
  - name: "talos"
    url: "https://github.com/siderolabs/cluster-api-bootstrap-provider-talos/releases/latest/bootstrap-components.yaml"
    type: "BootstrapProvider"
  - name: "talos"
    url: "https://github.com/siderolabs/cluster-api-control-plane-provider-talos/releases/latest/control-plane-components.yaml"
    type: "ControlPlaneProvider"
  - name: "sidero"
    url: "https://github.com/siderolabs/sidero/releases/latest/infrastructure-components.yaml"
    type: "InfrastructureProvider"

If you are going to use this provider as part of Sidero management plane, please refer to Sidero Docs on how to install and configure it.

This project can be built simply by running make release from the root directory. Doing so will create a file called _out/control-plane-components.yaml. If you wish, you can tweak settings by editing the release yaml. This file can then be installed into your management cluster with kubectl apply -f _out/control-plane-components.yaml.

Note that CACPPT should be deployed as part of a set of controllers for Cluster API. You will need at least the upstream CAPI components, the Talos bootstrap provider, and an infrastructure provider for v1beta1 CAPI capabilities.

CACPPT plays the following role in the whole Cluster API architecture:

You can use recommended Cluster API templates provided by Sidero Labs.

It contains templates for AWS and GCP, which are verified by the integration tests.

If you wish to craft your own manifests, here is some important info.

CACPPT supports a single API type, a TalosControlPlane. You can create YAML definitions of a TalosControlPlane and kubectl apply them as part of a larger CAPI cluster deployment. Below is a bare-minimum example.

A basic config:

apiVersion: controlplane.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha3
kind: TalosControlPlane
metadata:
  name: talos-cp
spec:
  version: v1.18.1
  replicas: 1
  infrastructureTemplate:
    kind: MetalMachineTemplate
    apiVersion: infrastructure.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha3
    name: talos-cp
  controlPlaneConfig:
    controlplane:
      generateType: controlplane

Note you must provide an infrastructure template for your control plane. See your infrastructure provider for how to craft that.

Note the generateType mentioned above. This is a required value in the spec for both controlplane and worker ("join") nodes. For a no-frills control plane config, you can simply specify controlplane depending on each config section. When creating a TalosControlPlane this way, you can then retrieve the talosconfig file that allows for osctl interaction with your nodes by doing something like kubectl get talosconfig -o yaml talos-cp-xxxx -o jsonpath='{.status.talosConfig}' after creation.

If you wish to do something more complex, we allow for the ability to supply an entire Talos machine config file to the resource. This can be done by setting the generateType to none and specifying a data field. This config file can be generated with talosctl config generate and the edited to supply the various options you may desire. This full config is blindly copied from the data section of the spec and presented under .status.controlPlaneData so that the upstream CAPI controllers can see it and make use.

An example of a more complex config:

apiVersion: control-plane.cluster.x-k8s.io/v1alpha2
kind: TalosControlPlane
metadata:
  name: talos-0
  labels:
    cluster.x-k8s.io/cluster-name: talos
spec:
  controlPlaneConfig:
    init:
        generateType: none
        data: |
            version: v1alpha1
            machine:
            type: controlplane
            token: xxxxxx
            ...
            ...
            ...
  ...
  ...

Note that specifying the full config above removes the ability for our control plane provider to generate a talosconfig for use. As such, you should keep track of the talosconfig that's generated when running talosctl config generate.