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Talos Cluster - Installation

The installation of the Talos Kubernetes Cluster is done in multiple steps. The first step is to startup the Admin VM from this repo (components/talos-cluster/virtual-talos-admin/Vagrantfile). This VM is used to manage the Talos Kubernetes Cluster.

The second step is to install the actual Talos nodes. These nodes are Raspberry Pi devices running Talos Linux. The nodes are not provisioned by Ansible. They run the Talos variant for Raspberry Pi directly.

Install Cluster with Control Plane and Worker Nodes

The config files inside this repo are auto-generated from talosctl. The *-patch.yml files however are manually created and are used to patch the Talos config files (meaning the are an input for generating the Talos config files).

Setup SD Cards for Raspberry Pi Nodes

These steps need to be done for each Raspberry Pi node that should join the Talos Kubernetes cluster.

  • Download the Talos image

    curl -LO https://factory.talos.dev/image/ee21ef4a5ef808a9b7484cc0dda0f25075021691c8c09a276591eedb638ea1f9/v1.8.0/metal-arm64.raw.xz

  • Extract image

    xz -d metal-arm64.raw.xz

  • Flash the SD card with "Disks" application which is shipped with Ubuntu. You should remove all partitions from the SD card. Then Choose "Restore Disk Image" from the menu in the and select the Talos image.

  • Once the SD card is flashed and inserted into the Raspberry Pi and boot. Check the FritzBox Router and Repeater settings for the new device.
    • Assign a name to the device. This should be the same as the hostname of the RasPi node itself.
    • Also ensure that the device always gets the same IP address (not mandatory but recommended).

Bootstrap the Talos Cluster

These steps only need to be done once when the initial setup is done or when the cluster is re-installed from scratch. The steps are not necessary when the cluster is already running and a new node is added.

  • Make sure you generated the Talos configuration from the Admin VM node. Only needs to be done once. Run:

    # Run from home-dir in Admin VM
./bootstrap-talos.sh

  • Copy the generated config to components/talos-cluster/node-configs/generated

  • Push the configuration files to the remote repository

Bootstrap ArgoCD

  • Bootstrap ArgoCD from the Admin VM. Only needs to be done once.

    # Run from home-dir in Admin VM
./bootstrap-argocd.sh

    The bootstrap-argocd.sh installs ArgoCD with the help of the ArgoCD Autopilot.

    Personal Access Token

    To bootstrap ArgoCD the script prompts for a Github personal access token to write the ArgoCD configuration to this repository. The token needs to have the repo scope. The token must be valid for as long as ArgoCD is used. This means that the token probably should never expire (unless you want to recover ArgoCD regularly with a new token).

    Recover an ArgoCD Installation

    In case the ArgoCD setup is broken, the bootstrap-argocd.sh script offers a recovery-option to re-install ArgoCD with all the configuration stored in the repository. So there is no need to re-configure everything manually or to backup the Talos Cluster (other than data that should explicitly be backed up). The cluster can be re-built from this configuration at any time.

Re-Install a fresh Talos Cluster

In case you want to re-install the cluster from scratch, this repo will already contain a cluste configuration. When installing a fresh cluster, the public and private keys will no longer match the new cluster.

  • Startup the Vagrantbox from components/talos-cluster/virtual-talos-admin/Vagrantfile.
  • On the host, remove the configuration files from components/talos-cluster/node-configs/generated (talosctlgenerates new configs while installing the new cluster).
  • Inside the Vagrantbox, remove .kube and .talos directories from the home directory.
  • Install the Talos OS onto SD cards and boot the Raspberry Pi nodes.
  • Run the bootstrap-talos.sh script to generate new configurations.
  • Copy the config files back to components/talos-cluster/node-configs/generated.
  • Recover the ArgoCD installation with the bootstrap-argocd.sh script. Remember to ue a valid Github personal access token.