Tinkerbell: Provisioning Bare Metal Servers Training Course

Introduction

• What is bare metal cloud?

Overview of Tinkerbell Technologies, Components and Approach

• Technologies: iPXE, DHCP, TFTP, gRPC, Docker, etc.
• Microservices: Boots, Hegel, OSIE, Tink, and PBnJ
• YAML based definitions
• Control plane for managing servers

Case Study: Global Bare Metal Provisioning at Packet

• Provisioning Ubuntu Servers at Scale

The Provisioning Workflow

• Assigning an IP address and image through the Boots DHCP Server
• Booting into OSIE (In-memory Operating System Installation Environment)
• Running Docker containers
• Tracking workflow execution
• Logging error messages

Defining the Target Machine Hardware

• CPU, pxe mode, ip address, hard disk partitions, hostname, etc.
• Uploading to Tinkerbell

Creating a Workflow Template

• Setting disk-wipe, disk-partition, bootloader, OS, etc.
• Assigning the workflow template to target machine

Storing and Retrieving Metadata

• Running the Metadata Service (Hegel) over gRPC and HTTP.
• Interfacing with the AWS EC2 metadata format.

Running the Workflow

• Operating the workflow engine using the CLI

Setting up VMs and Servers

• Running Power and Boot service (PBnJ)

Troubleshooting

Summary and Conclusion