Foundation
The foundation is the IaC layer that takes hardware and the network fabric and turns them into a running Kubernetes cluster on which the platform and apps can deploy.
apps
workloads
platform
in-cluster controllers
foundation
YOU ARE HERE — IaC & cluster bootstrap
fabric
the network
hardware
physical assets
What lives here
| Page | Layer | Driven by |
|---|---|---|
| Proxmox | Compute (production) | tofu/environment/production |
| Hetzner | Compute (edge) | tofu/environment/edge |
| Talos | Cluster OS | talos/{talos,edge}, topf |
| K3s (legacy) | Retired cluster distro | Historical reference only — both clusters run Talos today |
| Flux | GitOps reconciler | k8s/clusters/{talos,edge}/flux-system |
| OpenTofu | IaC tool itself | tofu/ |
| Ansible | Host provisioning | ansible/ |
| Docker hosts | Standalone container hosts | docker/, plus Synology + ad-hoc k3d |
Reading order
If you're new to the repo and want to understand how a node becomes part of the cluster:
- OpenTofu — the IaC tool that provisions everything below
- Proxmox / Hetzner — where the VMs come from
- Talos — what runs on those VMs, on both clusters
- Flux — what makes the cluster pull its own configuration
Each step is a discrete layer; the next one assumes the previous is in place.