Kairos hits 1.0 GA!

[mudler]

Hey, It's Ettore Di Giacinto (@mudler), creator and author of Kairos (formerly c3OS), and former lead of the Elemental project at SUSE.

I've always been a part of the Open Source ecosystem, and I've done all my work in the open (you can check out my Github profile if you don't believe me!). c3OS has, until now, been a "hobby project", a way for me to experiment with Immutable OS outside of my work time. As a result, it never got the maintenance and development cadence that it really deserved.

Today, all that changes. I’m excited to announce that:

• c3OS is now called "Kairos". This is a fresh start for the project, signaling a new development cadence and regular release cycle. Learn more here: c3OS rename/branding #84
• Hitting 1.0: It’s an important milestone for Kairos, as the project is tested and safe for daily use.
• I've joined Spectro Cloud as Head of Open Source. The Kairos project will be officially sponsored and part of the Spectro Cloud Open Source Office.

In this role as part of Spectro Cloud, I’m now able to work on the Kairos project full time. I’m committed to keeping Kairos fully community driven and Open Source, forever. Indeed, in the following days you will hear more about setting up our Governance, Office Hours and mailing list, and you’ll always be able to access our roadmap within Github! If you are excited about Kairos and would like to contribute, feel free to open up a PR or reach out to our chat.

So..where are we today?

• The Kairos project started more than a year ago, formally named c3OS. Initially, it was just a meta-distro (based both on openSUSE and Alpine) where you could spin up k3s clusters easily via cloud-init to bare metal, with P2P full-mesh capabilities, allowing clusters to stretch up to 1,000 kms.
• Today Kairos allows bootstrapping clusters without mesh capabilities, with different providers than k3s and in the future it will support hybrid mesh — that is, leveraging the mesh and ledger functionalities only to bootstrap and automatically configure KubeVIP environments also in local-network only.

What does Kairos let you do?:

• Onboard other Linux distributions and convert to an immutable system which is fully managed via Kubernetes.
• Create and customize your own OS to suit your needs via Kubernetes native extensions, and in runtime via live layering(not yet, but soon!). Yes, it means using Kubernetes CRDs and interacting with these resources in a Kube-native way!
• Lifecycle management: We are currently working on integrating with Cluster API and providing a complete bootstrap and full lifecycle management experience that can be packed and started from the ground-up with Kubernetes. This will allow you to build your cloud with a zero-touch provisioning paradigm.

We have some exciting items in the pipeline such as: Cloud native Edge persistent data encryption, Node auto scaling, Container registry Decentralization.. stay tuned for more updates soon!