What is Tinkerbell?

06 Nov 2020 · Seven minute read · on Gianluca's blog

News! Tech related notes are NOW published to ShippingBytes. See you there! I always felt this was not the right place for me to write consistently about tech and tools. So if you want to read more about that see you at the other side

First things first, Tinkerbell is an open-source project mainly written in Go that comes from PacketHost, now Equinix Metal. Equinix Metal is a cloud provider that serves bare metal servers. No virtual machines, no high-level services, I said bare metal! Imagine a colocation that you can rent per hour.

Tinkerbell is the software Equinix Metal dreamed about as an internal provisioner for datacenter automation. They took their internal provisioner and removed any PacketHost references of business specific code, and pushed it to GitHub for the community to enjoy the same technologies.

The project is a number of micro-services that provide various functionality to configure hardware and provision bother Operating System and additional software through it’s workflow engine.

What the project provides

The end goal

The Tinkerbell end work is to bring to life a piece of hardware.

Workflow and template

A template is a specification file that describes what we want to execute. A workflow starts from a template, and it has a particular target. Templates are reusable; workflows are a single execution and can’t be reused. The single unit of work in a template is called action. You can get as many actions you want in a template, and each action runs in its own Docker container.

Action

As mentioned above, actions are Docker containers and that means that you can build each action in isolation in the language you want. It can use python, bash, Golang, Rust, or whatever you can run in a container.

You may think that Docker would sound like an overhead, however we took a natural decision based on how we could use the container concept in operations. The concept of build, pull, and push has become commonplace within development environments, and we think it could also work well in operational environments too. Building containers to contain operational tasks in isolation and enhancing that with testing and simplified execution of a container is a clear benefit. It is an effective way to move code around in a reusable way without having to reinvent the distribution model. Some of the actions you will see very often in a Tinkerbell workflow may be:

But you will be able to write actions related to your business:

How a template and a workflow looks like

Unfortunately, there are not many examples, but as maintainers, the next three months will be all about public workflows and reusable actions.

Kinvolk wrote a blog post about how to provision Flatcar on bare metal with Tinkerbell.

The Tinkerbell documentation has an example of a “hello world.” template.

Frans van Berckel wrote a workflow for CentOS and Debian.

One of my next projects will be to write a workflow that won’t install an operating system. It will start something like k3s or k8s directly on Osie for my ephemeral homelab! I am not sure it has a sense or will ever work, but I think it is an excellent example: “it is not all about having a persisted and traditional operating system those days.”

How to get started

We put a fair amount of effort into a sandbox project and setup guide. You can run it locally with Vagrant or on Equinix Metal.

Aaron Ramblings wrote a blog post, “Tinkerbell or iPXE boot on OVH” using the sandbox to run Tinkerbell on OVH! I am still surprised when I read it because he experimented with the sandbox in a very early stage of the project, and in the same way, he was able to run sandbox on OVH; it can run almost wherever else (at least for the control plane part).

Next steps

With the help of our community we recently improved our continuous integration pipeline to build all the projects for various architecture: linux/386, linux/amd64, linux/arm/v6, linux/arm/v7, linux/arm64 levering Docker buildx, Qemu, and GitHub Actions. My goal was to be able to run the provisioner in a Raspberry Pi. Because as I wrote before, my homelab tends to go away, get moved, disconnected, and I think I can keep running reliably only a Raspberry PI as it is today. So I want to run the control plane on a RaspberryPI. I presume there are smarter things to do with multi-arch, but let’s be honest; we all have a RaspberryPI leftover somewhere.

We use the sandbox project as a way to release Tinkerbell’s version as an all project. We are pinning all the various dependencies such as Boots, Hegel, Tink-Server, CLI, Osie, and when they all pass the integration tests, we tag a new release. The generated artifacts are containers for now. We want to get binaries in this way. You can run Tinkerbell as you like, even without containers. At some point, we will tag and manage each component independently, but for now, it is a lot of effort.

Releasing new workflows is something we are working on already. So stay tuned!

Another project is available in the Tinkerbell GitHub organization that I didn’t mention because it is not hooked yet as part of the stack. After all, we are working at its version two. PBNJ provides a standard API to interact with various BMCs and IPMIs (Intelligent Platform Management Interface). Having this kind of ability in a datacenter is essential because we want to pilot things like reboot, restart, switch off for each server programmatically, and even as part of a workflow.

Conclusion

There already exists huge demand for bare-metal usage, which with the growth caused by things like 5G, dedicated GPUs/FPGAs, HPC, constant and expected performance and security boundaries is only going to grow. A recent report by the Mordor Intelligence company reports “The bare metal cloud market was valued at USD 1.75 billion in 2019 and expected to reach USD 10.56 billion by 2025” which clearly shows that there is growing demand for a modern platform to provision their bare-metal infrastructure.

Datacenter management is hard, and that’s why the public cloud got so much traction. For companies and products, managing hardware is unnecessary and a distraction, but when it becomes a requirement or when you think it is strategic to manage your own hardware Tinkerbell and its community comes to rescue you.

A big thank you goes to Dan for his review and support writing this article!

More, I want more!

Dan and Jeremy had a conversation about netbooting and bare metal provisioning. It is available on YouTube, you should really have a look at it!

Alex Ellis and Mark Coleman recorded a video setting up and using Tinkerbell. The video is a bit out of date and they did not use the new sandbox project because it was not available at that time. But still a good and valuable!

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