Project Lightning Talk: Finally Incubated! What Comes Next For Metal3?- Ádám Rozmán, Maintainer

This talk covers the journey of MetalCube, a project aimed at managing bare-metal machines from Kubernetes. The speaker, Adam Roseman, discusses the project's timeline, including its establishment in 2019, joining the CNCF sandbox in 2020, and achieving incubation status in 2025. The project has maintained strong community engagement, with numerous GitHub actions, releases, and new contributors. Future developments include multi-tenancy support for physical servers, enhanced provisioning security, and integration of OCI images for streamlined cluster installations. Additionally, the project is working on customization options and improved multi-architecture support, as well as expanding its scope to include physical switch management.

Welcome everyone. My name is Adam Roseman, and I will be talking about our journey so far in the incubated space. let's just first start with the fact that this is our seventh or sixth project updates on CubeCon. So, you can watch on YouTube all of the previous ones and see how our project progressed. Just a few words about the project itself. So, this is MetalCube, and our

goal is to manage bare-metal machines from Kubernetes. And if the users so desire, then they can also cluster those physical machines. We provide an end-to-end solution. So, if you have a rack of empty servers and you use MetalCube, you have a small cloud that you can manage. Our journey with uh just in in a few uh steps was basically that in 2019, we established the project. In

2020, we joined the sandbox, and we spent quite a long time in sandbox. But, finally in 2025, actually August 27th of 2025, we got incubated, and the QR code would lead you to the link of the CNCF blog post where uh the incubation was announced, and you can find some information about the project and the incubation review also there. So, a little bit about the community health.

That was something very interesting to me to see how the project changed after we joined the incubated projects. And basically, we we haven't seen any drop in in development activity. We are maintaining the pace of between today and and the day of incubation. Uh we recorded 36,000 individual GitHub actions. We released 59 releases across all of the fine five components that we provide releases for. We got

a new adopter in the form of Mirantis. Uh we increased the number of maintainers. We increased the number of unique human contributors. We have to now specifically state that not AI contributors. We have like five six bots running in our projects. Then, we also maintained the weekly community meetings. We had two large full-day meetups. And then, we started following the CNCF lead and and started including AI,

specifically Copilot for for reviews and to monitor our quite large CI. So, basically business as usual and and a little bit of growth. And then, the main main and most important what the future has for us. What we are focusing in the community, all of these topics that I listed are actually in development. Proposals have been already accepted. PRs have been pushed for multiple of these topics.

First one is the multi-tenancy for the physical servers, meaning that we have a a bare-metal host abstraction in Kubernetes, and this abstraction is the abstraction of a physical server, and we would like to make it easier for different consumers to consume these machines without knowing anything about the specific machines. So, we are in the process of developing an intermediate layer. So, consumers can just file a bare-metal

host claim and receive a bare-metal host. And after they release the host, it gets cleaned and returned to its default state. But, it's a very challenging to develop this. Then, the next one is provisioning security. As I said, we offer an end-to-end solution. So, we are first on site. Basically, we already interact with the machines when they don't have an operating system. They might have old firmware.

They might be never used before. So, it's crucial for our processes to be very secure and to secure other well-known processes like I PXC or the Redfish booting or the access to the BMCs or or disk encryption at very early stages or or attestation of the boot process and all these things. So, we are working heavily on that. Uh then, the next one is as you can

imagine, for long time OCI images were not the default disk image for a physical server. Uh but, we our our goal is to to allow users to use only OCI images and end up with fully installed, fully provisioned clusters, and both the provisioning agents, the operating system images, and everything on top of that could be could be supplied by the OCI well-known OCI pipelines. Uh and then,

we we are also working and come up with a few customization options. Uh plugins that can help speed up the deployment provisioning process. And then, we are working on better multi-architecture support for all of our images and end components. We are testing more and more IPv6 and IPv6 only use cases. And one of the biggest news in our community is that very very soon, we will offer

not just server management, but also physical switch management. as a closing word, you can scan the QR code and find out more about the project and and meet with us every day at the P21B kiosk. Thank you.