Platform foundation
Talos Linux
Immutable, API-managed Linux that the whole cluster boots from
What it does
Talos Linux is a minimal Linux distribution built only to run Kubernetes, configured entirely through a declarative machine config and an API instead of SSH.
How it runs here
Every node in the cluster runs Talos, with the NVMe disks on the two SSD-equipped workers mounted for Longhorn through each node's machine config.
Connects to
Why I chose it
No SSH and no package manager to drift out of sync means node configuration stays reproducible, which matters more on single-board hardware with no out-of-band console.