Kubernetes Integration

This section provides an overview of how you can run Kubernetes clusters on top of the Bare Metal API of IronCore.

Provider Specific Integrations

The typical provider-specific integration points in Kubernetes are the following:

• CNI: Container Network Interface, used for networking in Kubernetes.
• CSI: Container Storage Interface, used for storage in Kubernetes.
• CRI: Container Runtime Interface, used for container runtimes in Kubernetes.
• Loadbalancing: Load balancing for services in Kubernetes.
• Other Infrastructure specific Integrations: This includes any other provider-specific integrations such as Node topology information.

As for CNI and CRI you can use almost any implementation that is compatible with Kubernetes.

For CSI, there is no IronCore bare metal-specific implementation of the CSI interface as we do not at the moment provide a dynamic provisioning of volumes for bare metal servers. However, you could use the local volume type to use local storage on the bare metal servers. Alternatively, any local storage implementation that is compatible with Kubernetes can be used.

Additionally, the IronCore Cloud Controller Manager provides the necessary integration points of handling the Node lifecycle and topology information.

Load balancing for Services of type LoadBalancer is done by the metal-load-balancer-controller.

Cluster API Provider

The Cluster API Provider for Bare Metal is a Kubernetes project that provides a declarative way to manage bare metal clusters using the Cluster API (CAPI) framework.

More details on the Cluster API provider for bare metal can be found in the Cluster API Provider section.

Gardener Integration

IronCore is also integrated with Gardener, a Kubernetes-native project for managing Kubernetes clusters at scale. The section on Gardener Integration provides more details on how to use IronCore with Gardener.