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How to interact with the Talos Cluster

This guide provides an overview of how to interact with a Talos-managed Kubernetes cluster using talosctl and kubectl, the primary tools for managing and interacting with Talos nodes and Kubernetes workloads respectively.

You can use the virtual-talos-admin Vagrantbox to interact with the Talos Cluster. The virtual-talos-admin Vagrantbox is pre-configured with talosctl, kubectl, and k9s. The kubeconfig file is already configured to point to the Talos cluster. The provisioning is done by Ansible and the playbook for the Vagrantbox.

vagrant destroy -f

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

talosctl

talosctl is available on the Admin VM node. The tool expects flags to identify the targeted node and the cluster management endpoint.

talosctl --nodes talos-cp.fritz.box --endpoints talos-cp.fritz.box dashboard
talosctl --nodes talos-w1.fritz.box --endpoints talos-cp.fritz.box dashboard
talosctl --nodes talos-w2.fritz.box --endpoints talos-cp.fritz.box dashboard
talosctl --nodes talos-w3.fritz.box --endpoints talos-cp.fritz.box dashboard
talosctl --nodes talos-w4.fritz.box --endpoints talos-cp.fritz.box dashboard

To avoid specifying the flags every time, the Ansible playbook wrote aliases onto the Admin VM node.

talosctl-cp dashboard
talosctl-w1 dashboard
talosctl-w2 dashboard
talosctl-w3 dashboard
talosctl-w4 dashboard

kubectl

kubectl can be used from the Admin VM right away. The kubeconfig file is already configured to point to the Talos cluster. The bootstrap-talos.sh merged the config into ~/.kube/config.

A word on Infrastructure as Code

Keep in mind, that we treat everything as code. So we avoid running e.g. kubectl apply commands entirely. Instead, we use ArgoCD to manage the applications and configurations deployed to the Talos Cluster. There might be times when a PoC for e.g. Terraform establishes new ways to deploy applications to Kubernetes. But these PoCs still follow Infrastructure as Code principles.

k9s

k9s is a terminal-based UI to interact with Kubernetes clusters. The tool is installed on the Admin VM and uses the same kubeconfig file as kubectl.

ArgoCD

To interact with your Talos Cluster through ArgoCD, follow these steps:

  1. Run ~/port-forward-argocd.sh on the Admin VM to retrieve the default admin password and to port-forward the ArgoCD server's service.

  2. Access ArgoCD from a Browser: Once port-forwarding is active, open a web browser and navigate to https://localhost:8080. You will likely see a security warning due to the self-signed certificate. You can safely ignore this warning and proceed to the login page.

  3. Login to ArgoCD: On the login page, use the default credentials to log in:

    Username: admin
Password: The password retrieved in step 1

    Once logged in, you will have access to the ArgoCD dashboard where you can manage your applications and configurations deployed to the Talos Cluster.