What is OperatingSystemManager?

Operating System Manager (OSM) is an open source project by Kubermatic, it is responsible for creating and managing the required configurations for worker nodes in a Kubernetes cluster. It decouples operating system configurations into dedicated and isolable resources for better modularity and maintainability.

These isolated and extensible resources allow a high degree of customization which allows users to modify the worker node configurations to suit their use cases. This is useful for hybrid, edge, and air-gapped environments.

Configurations for worker nodes comprise of set of scripts used to prepare the node, install packages, configure networking, storage etc. These configurations prepare the nodes for running kubelet.

Problem Statement

Machine-Controller is used to manage the worker nodes in KubeOne clusters. It depends on user-data plugins to generate the required configurations for worker nodes. Each operating system requires its own user-data plugin. These configs are then injected into the worker nodes using provisioning utilities such as cloud-init or ignition. Eventually the nodes are bootstrapped to become a part of a kubernetes cluster.

This has been the norm till machine-controller v1.54.0 and it works as expected. Although over time, it has been observed that this workflow has certain limitations.

Machine Controller Limitations

• Machine Controller expects ALL the supported user-data plugins to exist and be ready. User might only be interested in a subset of the available operating systems. For example, user might only want to work with ubuntu.
• The user-data plugins have templates defined in-code. Which is not ideal since code changes are required to update those templates. Then those code changes need to become a part of the subsequent releases for machine-controller and KubeOne. So we need a complete release cycle to ship those changes to customers.
• Managing configs for multiple cloud providers, OS flavors and OS versions, adds a lot of complexity and redundancy in machine-controller.
• Since the templates are defined in-code, there is no way for an end user to customize them to suit their use-cases.
• Each cloud provider sets some sort of limits for the size of user-data, machine won’t be created in case of non-compliance. For example, at the time of writing this, AWS has set a hard limit of 16KB.
• Better support for air-gapped environments is required.

Operating System Manager was created to overcome these limitations.