Getting started with Infrastructure as a Service

This section provides a comprehensive guide to getting started with IronCore's Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer. It covers the prerequisites, local setup, and how to create and manage resources such as virtual machines, storage, and networking.

Before you are using IronCore IaaS, please make yourself familiar with the core concepts of IronCore as described in the architecture overview section.

Local Setup

The fastest way to get started with IronCore IaaS is to run it locally inside a kind cluster. Therefore, you can use ironcore-in-a-box which is a project tailored to run IronCore IaaS locally.

Prerequisites

• curl
• make
• go
• docker

Installation

To do that clone the ironcore-in-a-box repository and run the provided script:

git clone https://github.com/ironcore-dev/ironcore-in-a-box.git

To start the IronCore stack you simply run:

make up

Inside the ironcore-in-a-box directory. This will create a kind cluster and deploy all necessary parts to run IronCore IaaS.

For Linux users, everything should work out of the box. Please consult the project README for more details on how to run the stack on macOS or Windows.

Usage

Once all IronCore components are up and running, you can start using the IaaS layer. ironcore-in-a-box provides a conclusive example on how to create a Machine and all necessary resources to run a virtual machine here.

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ironcore-dev/ironcore-in-a-box/refs/heads/main/examples/machine/machine.yaml

More examples can be found in the Usage Guides section, which provides detailed instructions on how to create and manage various resources.