How to bootstrap a Talos cluster manually with Terraform and then hand it over to the TF Flux operator?

[kees-closed]

I want to start a 5 node cluster with Rasperry Pi's to learn more about Flux. I want to use Talos, which has a Terraform provider. My plan is to use GitOps, also for Terraform. Flux is then very interesting, since it can both manage Terraform and K8s workloads.

However, how to bootstrap such a cluster with Terraform and then hand it over to the Flux Terraform operator? The manual apply creates a local tfstate file. Before the TF operator can take over, it needs to be aware of this tfstate file. Note that Talos Linux needs to be bootstrapped first and then Cilium (CNI) and then Flux. There is no existing control plane in this scenario, everything starts from scratch. Hence my curiosity about how to do this handover properly and timely.

I would like to know how people do this in general and what to do and what not to do in such a project.

[matheuscscp]

I'm working on a terraform module for bootstrapping Flux Operator, keep an eye here:

• https://github.com/matheuscscp/terraform-kubernetes-flux-operator-bootstrap
• https://registry.terraform.io/modules/matheuscscp/flux-operator-bootstrap/kubernetes/latest

I've only recently started working on this. After it satisfies a few more requirements I have in mind, we will move it to controlplaneio-fluxcd/terraform-kubernetes-flux-operator-bootstrap.

[stefanprodan]

This will not solve baremetal bootstrap where there is no CNI. The TF provider would need to run Flux Operator and Flux like AIO does, on the host network without kube-proxy.

[stefanprodan]

Check out:

• https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops
• https://github.com/xunholy/k8s-gitops

There is massive community of Flux users deploying homelabs with Talos, you may want to join them here: https://discord.com/invite/home-operations