Technology · Ebook

Kairos: The Immutable Edge OS for Kubernetes

by Shriira Press

Kairos is a CNCF Sandbox meta-distribution that wraps any base Linux distro — Ubuntu, Alpine, Fedora, openSUSE, and more — and turns it into an immutable operating system delivered as an OCI container image. It boots with a read-only root, configures itself from a single cloud-init file, upgrades atomically through an A/B partition scheme that always rolls back, secures exposed hardware with trusted boot and disk encryption, and can bootstrap a K3s or K0s cluster on its own over a peer-to-peer mesh. This book follows that lifecycle end to end: the immutable filesystem, cloud-init configuration, the image factory, atomic upgrades and recovery, trusted boot and kcrypt, p2p clustering, the Kubernetes-native operator, and how it all comes together in practice.

Contents

1. 1Preface
2. 2Chapter 1 — What Kairos Is
3. 3Chapter 2 — The Immutable Filesystem
4. 4Chapter 3 — Configuration with Cloud-Init
5. 5Chapter 4 — The Image Factory
6. 6Chapter 5 — Atomic Upgrades and Recovery
7. 7Chapter 6 — Trusted Boot and Encryption
8. 8Chapter 7 — Peer-to-Peer Clustering
9. 9Chapter 8 — Kubernetes-Native Fleet Management
10. 10Chapter 9 — Kairos in Practice