Gardener Integration with IronCore Bare Metal

Apart from the Cluster API Provider for Bare Metal, IronCore is also integrated with Gardener, a Kubernetes-native project for managing Kubernetes clusters at scale.

There are two main components in the Gardener integration with IronCore:

• Machine Controller Manager (MCM): This component is responsible for managing the lifecycle of machines in a Kubernetes cluster. It uses the metal-operator API types to provision and manage bare metal servers.
• Gardener Extension Provider: This component provides the necessary integration points for Gardener to manage bare metal clusters.

Machine Controller Manager (MCM)

The [machine-controller-manager-provider-ironcore](https://github.com/ironcore-dev/machine-controller-manager-provider-ironcore-metal) is responsible for managing the lifecycle of Nodes in a Kubernetes cluster. Here the MCM in essence is translating Gardener Machine resource to ServerClaims and wrapping the user-data coming from the Gardner OS extensions into an Ignition Secret.

Gardener Extension Provider

The gardener-extension-provider-ironcore-metal is responsible for providing the necessary integration points for Gardener to manage bare metal clusters.

Those integration points include:

• Configure and the Cloud Controller Manager to handle the Node lifecycle and topology information.
• Configure the metal-load-balancer-controller to handle Service of type LoadBalancer.
• Configure the Machine Controller Manager (MCM) to manage the creation of Nodes in the cluster.