bare-metal-operator

README

Bare Metal Operator

Kubernetes operator for managing bare metal host pools in the Open Sovereign AI Cloud (OSAC) project.

Description

Bare Metal Operator is part of the OSAC project. It watches the following custom resources and reconciles them to their desired state:

• BareMetalPool (bmp, bmpool) — provisions pools of bare metal hosts organized by host type (e.g., GPU nodes, worker nodes). Each pool can specify the number of replicas needed per host type and apply configuration profiles with template parameters.

Configuration

Configuration is supplied via environment variables (e.g. from a Secret mounted into the manager deployment) and volume mounts. The following are supported:

Inventory

The operator reads inventory configuration to gather information from backend inventory systems.

Configuration file: /etc/osac/inventory/inventory.yaml (default)

The path can be overridden with the OSAC_INVENTORY_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.

Example:

name: my-inventory
type: openstack
options:
  openstack:
    cloud: osac-project
hostClass: openstack
networkClass: openstack

Fields:

• name — identifier for this inventory backend
• type — inventory backend type (e.g., openstack)
• options — backend-specific configuration options
• hostClass — host management class to use
• networkClass — network class to use

Host Lock

The operator uses distributed locking to coordinate host assignments across multiple controller instances and prevent race conditions when claiming hosts.

Configuration file: /etc/osac/lock/lock.yaml (default)

The path can be overridden with the OSAC_LOCKER_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.

Example:

type: redis
ttl: 30s
options:
  addr: osac-redis-inventory:6379
  db: 0

Fields:

• type — lock backend type (currently only redis is supported)
• ttl — lock expiration time (duration format, e.g., 30s, 1m)
• options — backend-specific configuration options
  • For Redis:
    • addr — Redis server address (default: localhost:6379)
    • db — Redis database number (default: 0)

Environment Variables

The following environment variables can be used to configure controller behavior:

Configuration Paths

• OSAC_INVENTORY_CONFIG_PATH — Path to the inventory configuration file. Default: /etc/osac/inventory/inventory.yaml
• OSAC_LOCKER_CONFIG_PATH — Path to the distributed lock configuration file. Default: /etc/osac/lock/lock.yaml

BareMetalPool Controller

• OSAC_HOST_DELETION_POLL_INTERVAL — Interval for polling host deletion status during BareMetalPool teardown. Default: 5s

HostLease Controller

• OSAC_NO_FREE_HOSTS_POLL_INTERVAL — Requeue interval when no free hosts are available in the inventory. Default: 30s
• OSAC_TRY_LOCK_FAIL_POLL_INTERVAL — Requeue interval when lock acquisition fails. Default: 1s

Example:

env:
  - name: OSAC_INVENTORY_CONFIG_PATH
    value: "/custom/path/inventory.yaml"
  - name: OSAC_LOCKER_CONFIG_PATH
    value: "/custom/path/lock.yaml"
  - name: OSAC_HOST_DELETION_POLL_INTERVAL
    value: "10s"
  - name: OSAC_NO_FREE_HOSTS_POLL_INTERVAL
    value: "60s"
  - name: OSAC_TRY_LOCK_FAIL_POLL_INTERVAL
    value: "2s"

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• go version v1.25.0+
• docker version 17.03+.
• kubectl version v1.11.3+.
• Access to a Kubernetes v1.11.3+ cluster.

To Deploy on the cluster

Build and push your image to the location specified by IMG:

make image-build image-push IMG=<some-registry>/bare-metal-operator:tag

NOTE: This image ought to be published in the personal registry you specified. And it is required to have access to pull the image from the working environment. Make sure you have the proper permission to the registry if the above commands don't work.

Install the CRDs into the cluster:

make install

Deploy the Manager to the cluster with the image specified by IMG:

make deploy IMG=<some-registry>/bare-metal-operator:tag

NOTE: If you encounter RBAC errors, you may need to grant yourself cluster-admin privileges or be logged in as admin.

Create instances of your solution

You can apply the samples (examples) from the config/sample:

kubectl apply -k config/samples/

NOTE: Ensure that the samples has default values to test it out.

To Uninstall

Delete the instances (CRs) from the cluster:

kubectl delete -k config/samples/

Delete the APIs(CRDs) from the cluster:

make uninstall

UnDeploy the controller from the cluster:

make undeploy

Project Distribution

Following are the steps to build the installer and distribute this project to users.

1. Build the installer for the image built and published in the registry:

make build-installer IMG=<some-registry>/bare-metal-operator:tag

NOTE: The makefile target mentioned above generates an 'install.yaml' file in the dist directory. This file contains all the resources built with Kustomize, which are necessary to install this project without its dependencies.

1. Using the installer

Users can just run kubectl apply -f to install the project, i.e.:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<org>/bare-metal-operator/<tag or branch>/dist/install.yaml

Contributing

// TODO(user): Add detailed information on how you would like others to contribute to this project

NOTE: Run make help for more information on all potential make targets

More information can be found via the Kubebuilder Documentation

License

Copyright 2026.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.