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Lead Image © joingate, 123RF.com

Lean Linux distribution for Kubernetes

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Article from ADMIN 85/2025
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In the world of container virtualization, the operating systems of compute nodes are largely degraded to non-player characters that can do little more than start and stop containers. Talos Linux takes the game to the extreme and offers a system for Kubernetes that weighs in at less than 90MB.

Huge environments for automation and orchestration used to be standard – think Ansible, Puppet, and others; however, today's buzzword is "reduction." Logically, a system that only needs to run containers can easily do without a massive user space; you don't need additional services on the system or extravagant configuration options. Strictly speaking, you don't even need a package manager – at least if you don't intend to update the system while it is running. Instead, you would remove all the containers and then reinstall more up-to-date software. A simple Linux kernel with a paired down set of drivers in combination with a runtime environment for containers – typically Docker Community Edition (CE) or Podman – is absolutely fine for this scenario.

Proponents of immutable IT have developed and radicalized their strategy. Whereas some Linux distributions still offer SSH and a local shell, immutable IT approaches assume you don't even need SSH to log in to remote systems. One of the solutions that takes this approach is Talos Linux, a distribution for operating systems whose core task is being part of a Kubernetes cluster.

Reduction

Reduction is more than an academic exercise in the frugal use of space on storage devices. A great deal of work and maintenance overhead is offloaded from the Linux distribution vendor. However, it also shifts a significant part of the support overhead from the Linux providers to the application vendor, because Red Hat, SUSE, and the like can correctly assert that users are getting MySQL in a container directly from Oracle. According to the Linux distributors' common understanding, any problems that arise as a result need to be settled between the program vendor and the customer, and not between the customer and the distributor. In short, as Linux providers see it, this principle offers so many benefits that it seems irresistible.

Red

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