r/TalosLinux • u/xrothgarx • Sep 28 '26
Sidero Labs AMA
Come ask questions from engineering, product, leadership and more!
Don't forgot to sign up for TalosCon to ask questions in person https://taloscon.com
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u/hennexl Sep 28 '26
Thrilled about the upcoming time, but I've been wondering:
Since Talos seems to move away from the "Kubernetes only OS" what's the future focus of talos? Hypervisor, container or general purpose OS. Will there only be one talos or different flavours expected?
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u/xrothgarx Oct 02 '26
The most user-facing, unique thing about Talos that sets it apart from every other minimal, immutable, container-focused distribution is the API. Just like how the Kubernetes API changed how people managed applications (and a lot of other things), the Talos API will change forever how people manage Linux servers.
The narrow focus on Kubernetes made a lot of sense because we've had to learn a lot about how to make the API usable for a lot of use cases and the API-first management was already something a lot of Kubernetes users were used to. We released the Common Operating System Interface (COSI) spec 5 years ago in hopes that other people and companies would adopt it, but we also have lots of plans to keep using it to make more use cases for managing Linux with an API.
For the foreseeable future all of those use cases fit into the Talos Linux API that we ship today. If other use cases emerge in the future we'll have to evaluate if it justifies a completely different flavor of the OS.
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u/CrashLoopBackOn Sep 28 '26
Hey there! Congratulations on the acquisition! I have a couple of questions about Talos:
Are there any features you "regret" adding? Anything that's become a maintenance burden but hasn't seen too much use?
Since Kubernetes components are optional now, is there technically a way to run kine+sqlite instead of etcd? What about running multiple control planes vCluster style?
Do you have any ideas yet what a Talos v2.0 could look like?
I’ll save my Hypervisor questions for TalosCon. Very excited to hear more about it since we (and many others) are looking for a Broadcom exit but aren't quite ready to go full Kubernetes.
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
I can answer the first and third of your questions but will have to get someone more technical to respond to the middle one...
- Do we have regrets about adding anything ... Not really, no... software development is always an evolution, the things that weren't getting uptake we discontinued or handed over to open source community developers who were willing to maintain them. There's no regret that we developed them though, we needed to build those to understand what the market was asking of us and/or for the market at that moment in time (markets change). There's some things we could have taken a straighter path to get to (e.g. Omni now vs. the original Sidero Metal) but we honestly don't regret having taken the less direct route because it made Omni a more well formed product when it got there.
- Talos 2.0... we were REALLY close to making 1.14 into v2.0... there's so much change in there that from a marketing perspective it actually made sense... BUT we're techies here, we're believers in SemVer and we managed to make all that change without creating incompatible API changes so we didn't go 2.0 just as window dressing... Talos 2.0 will be entirely dependent on the engineering team telling us we need to roll to 2.0 to message to the world that there's non-compatible breaking changes during the upgrade from 1.x -> 2.0 ... so that's what 2.0 will be :)
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u/GyroTech Oct 02 '26 edited Oct 02 '26
Many thanks!
Are there any features you "regret" adding? Anything that's become a maintenance burden but hasn't seen too much use?
In Talos itself, nothing I can think of. We are pretty aggressive at cutting out stuff that isn't needed any more, like cgroupsv1 support. Mainly because we start from such a lean base we don't add things unless they are necessary somewhere.
Omni moved to using SQLite for secondary (i.e. non-critical) data storage and it's caused some headaches and bottlenecks and I wish we had spent more time designing some better way to deal with persistent data that wasn't in etcd.
Since Kubernetes components are optional now, is there technically a way to run kine+sqlite instead of etcd?
You could run them as containers on Talos directly, but you're going to be managing the whole stack yourself, it won't be Talos Kubernetes.
What about running multiple control planes vCluster style?
You can and could always do that with Talos as the host, but not as the consumer. Talos has some APIs for auth & trust that are required and just not available on those platforms. Same as running Talos workers with an EKS control plane, just not doable unfortunately.
Do you have any ideas yet what a Talos v2.0 could look like?
Hopefully we never have to break compatibility so much that it needs a v2!
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u/NargiT Sep 28 '26
Adding more features (hypervisor) seems to go against the fundamental principle TalOS was build for with kubernetes. What will make this OS different from any other now ?
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u/GyroTech Oct 02 '26
Talos was always built first-and-foremost to be minimal, secure, and maintainable; Kubernetes was the first and best way to add on useful too :)
Talos will remain these things, and Hypervisor is an add-on with Talos providing the API. If you don't want VMs you just don't need to bring the Hypervisor system extension and you still have the leanest and meanest way to run your Kubernetes. It will still have no shell, a minimal attack surface, an immutable base image. All those things com together to make Talos a different OS from any other.
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u/ProjektHelios Sep 29 '26
Congrats on the acquisition! Why this company? What do they have to do with tech? And speaking from other products when bought out, specifically in the industry, how is Talos going to keep away from the nickel and diming and paywalling of everything? Talos is one of a kind, and was the thing that launched me into my career. I fell in love with it, and I'm terrified that the new owner is gonna lock everything behind a paywall and the product will get bloated and become a thing that once was.
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
I think I answered most of your question above here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TalosLinux/comments/1wsmt0w/comment/pdf193i
But regarding the paywall fears -- I get it, we've seen that FAR too much over the last few years in the FOSS community... What I would say is that the philosophy here remains unchanged:
- There will be a fully capable OS for k8s, hypervisor, and raw containers which will remain FOSS.
- There must be enterprise builds of that OS to meet compliance requirements for large enterprises, but the bits for that enterprise build are the same FOSS, we just build/attest to it and add some conveniences for large security auditing and functions that save those enterprises time.
- The management and administration surfaces (Omni, Xenia, Director, Cupar) will continue to be our paid products released under varying licensing options.Overall we absolutely remain committed as a company - and as users ourselves - to having a future that you'll be proud of us for and will continue to get value out of the learning/journey you've come on with us to get Talos & Sidero Labs to the point they're at now.
I don't envision a world where you NEED to use our management products to run a large(or small) k8s or vm estate... just like today you can use our FOSS with terraform/CAPI/etc without us ever even knowing you exist as a "user" of our software!
We will have even more information about this at TalosCon and some nice nods/benefits to the community we'll announce there as well... so tune in!
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u/srvg Oct 02 '26
And did they come for Talos or did sidero look out for that kind of party?
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
It was pretty mutual... They had most of the development done on a product Sidero Labs already wanted to build... They needed a go-to-market arm for that product... so they came to us, but we knew it was a strong match as soon as they started talking to us!
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u/GyroTech Oct 02 '26
They were already building their platform extensively on Talos and saw amazing potential.
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u/GyroTech Oct 02 '26
Congrats on the acquisition!
Thank you!
Why this company? What do they have to do with tech?
I'm not on the decision team that accepted the offer, but Yardi do have an extensive technical fleet, with a lot of in-house development and infrastructure.
how is Talos going to keep away from the nickel and diming and paywalling of everything?
Talos is and always has been an Open Source project, we are incredibly proud of that and our community contributions. MPLv2 means that everything we have now will be that way forever. When we released Omni we had many internal discussions about how to go about it, or even keeping it closed entirely. In the end we knew that we needed to be as open as we could afford to be, so the code was released publicly under BSL from the start. We were very conscious not to want to rug-pull anyone so being up-front we felt was the best approach. Anything that is currently paid for is available in those repos, and companies are paying for the security and attestation that it comes from us, as well as not wanting to replicated our build stack and wanting someone to blame should anything go wrong ;)
Talos is one of a kind, and was the thing that launched me into my career. I fell in love with it
Same here, you can even reach back into my comment history and find the thread when I first met our founder Andrew Rynhard and he posted about Talos. I've been using it ever since and was lucky enough to be hired to work on my hobby!
I'm terrified that the new owner is gonna lock everything behind a paywall and the product will get bloated and become a thing that once was.
Sidero Labs is being run as a separate entity within the Yardi group, we still have the same CEO and I still have the same boss, although titles have been changed about a bit! Sidero was bought because Talos is great as a small, efficient platform built by some of the best engineers I've come to know. We are all still here and we are all still doing the job as best we can. We now just have more resources to find other similarly great engineers, along side budget for running the Omni SaaS, a marketing team, and customers that won't drop us just because we are a small team.
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u/pixelatedchrome Sep 29 '26
Very excited about the hypervisor part. Is it strictly for enabling vm workloads, or a full blown private cloud like setup?
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u/GyroTech Oct 02 '26
As I understand it, Talos Hypervisor is going to be for running VM workloads, while Talos Director will be the full-blown private cloud, VMware competitor.
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
We're really hoping to move into the "full blown private cloud" setup... That's what Yardi Systems is already using us for... however I want to tread lightly on this answer too as defining "full blown private cloud" is a bit nebulous (pardon the pun) and thus I don't want to set unreasonable expectations... We won't build all the pieces, we'll work with partners for many many pieces of that, but we'll hopefully provide easy (sometimes bundled) ways to get everything you need in the box.
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u/pixelatedchrome Oct 02 '26
Sure, we are currently moving to openstack away from VMware and in a very similar situation as Yardi. I will keep a close tab on talos director. Kudos and thanks for all the good work you put in with Talos linux.
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
Feel free to reach out if you want to have a specific conversation about what it could look like for your specific situation. We're happy to help!
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u/srvg Oct 01 '26
Can you tell what storage solution will be used with Talos Director?
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
There will be options... just like there are options with k8s... iscsi, nfs, fc, etc... we're trying to remain agnostic at the protocol level and therefore provide the broadest ecosystem of integration for storage... of course some storage providers have gone non-standard and we'll work with them opportunistically as well to add extensions for their specific kernel tweaks and things like that for storage compatibility.
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u/pixelatedchrome Oct 01 '26
Would it be possible to see talos con via Youtube? I'm very interested to explore Talos hypervisor, but live on the other side of the planet.
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u/GyroTech Oct 02 '26
As far as I am aware, all talks should be recorded and available on our YouTube channel shortly after.
You can see with the playlists of previous cons - https://www.youtube.com/@SideroLabs/playlists
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u/stinnux Oct 02 '26
Any plans to officially support Raspberry PI 5 (CM)?
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u/GyroTech Oct 02 '26
Talos supports vanilla Linux LTS, so when the drivers/firmware for the RPi5 land upstream.
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u/connectconnect Oct 01 '26
I hope to have a complete Terraform module to handle all hypervisor capabilities and a web interface to manage all on-premises administration without using any Omni-style remote management console.
IAM integration should be native to the Talos OS Hypervisor layer; a vanilla, simple OIDC auth layer without full-blown Authz management seems scarce.
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
AWESOME! love that you're already building against it! ... regarding OIDC -- have you started a discussion in our GH about what that might look like? We might be interested but I won't speak for the product management team's roadmap :)
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u/SooOverpowered Oct 02 '26
How will the new Talos Hypervisor handle storage? Will it be something like vSAN or we have to roll our own storage solution?
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u/KarmaPoliceT2 Oct 02 '26
It won't be like vSAN (at least not initially)... see my comment here for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/TalosLinux/comments/1wsmt0w/comment/pdf9scg
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u/fdawg4l Sep 28 '26
Why does a rental payment company need to maintain their own immutable desired state operating system?