Issue #112
Read about infrastructure and programming topics and news every week
Friday, 5th December 2025
It’s down again, several services affected.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158191
How Azure Copilot’s New Agents Automate DevOps and SecOps
I saw this coming, and even if many people are sceptical, AI is here to stay, also in infrastructure. Configuration languages are easy to master for AI, but you can train agents on good practices like the Azure Well-Architected Framework. From the article:
We could use natural language to, say, deploy a Python Flask app with PostgreSQL backend and enable monitoring for Application Insights and secure secrets in Key Vault.
https://thenewstack.io/how-azure-copilots-new-agents-automate-devops-and-secops/
How Kubernetes Became the New Linux
Everybody is using Kubernetes; it’s the new Linux. I would not say that, but it is no far from the truth. The video and article also talk about Karpenter
https://thenewstack.io/how-kubernetes-became-the-new-linux/
Metal3
Metal³ (“metal cubed”) is an open-source project that brings Kubernetes-native, declarative management to bare-metal servers—you register physical machines, inspect their hardware, and provision OS images using Kubernetes APIs (CRDs + controllers). It runs as Kubernetes components on a “management” cluster, so you manage hardware the same way you manage apps: with YAML and reconcilers. (Metal³ - Metal Kubed)
How it works at a high level:
You represent each physical server as a
BareMetalHostcustom resource (with BMC details/credentials).The Bare Metal Operator (BMO) manages the host lifecycle: inventory/inspection (CPU/RAM/disks/NICs), disk cleaning, and provisioning the requested image—typically leveraging Ironic under the hood. (GitHub)
If you want full Kubernetes clusters on that hardware, Metal³ integrates with Cluster API via Cluster API Provider Metal3 (CAPM3), enabling Cluster API-style create/scale/upgrade workflows on bare metal. (GitHub)
Typical prerequisites/assumptions:
Servers with BMC/remote management (e.g., Redfish/iDRAC/IPMI), an Ironic instance, and a Kubernetes management cluster (often kind/minikube for dev). (Metal³ User Guide)
Metal³ FAQ notes support for x86_64 and aarch64 (mixed-arch in the same deployment isn’t supported yet). (Metal³ - Metal Kubed)
Project status: CNCF announced Metal3.io became a CNCF incubating project (Aug 2025). (CNCF)
Ironic
Ironic is an open-source service for automating provisioning and lifecycle management of bare metal machines. Born as the Bare Metal service of the OpenStack cloud software suite, it has evolved to become a semi-autonomous project, adding ways to be deployed independently as a standalone service, for example using Bifrost, and integrates in other tools and projects, as in the case of Metal3.
Ironic nowadays supports the two main standard hardware management interfaces, Redfish and IPMI, and thanks to its large community of contributors, it can provide native support for many different bare-metal hardware vendors, such as Dell, Fujitsu, HPE, and Supermicro.
The Metal3 project adopted Ironic as the back-end that manages bare-metal hosts behind native Kubernetes API.
https://book.metal3.io/ironic/introduction.html