Tinkerbell

Tinkerbell

License

Tinkerbell is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE for the full license text. Some of the projects used by the Tinkerbell project may be governed by a different license, please refer to its specific license.

Tinkerbell is part of the CNCF Projects.

Community

The Tinkerbell community meets bi-weekly on Tuesday. The meeting details can be found here.

Community Resources:

• Community Slack
• CNCF #tinkerbell
• YouTube Channel (demos, meeting recordings, virtual meetups)

What's Powering Tinkerbell?

The Tinkerbell stack consists of several microservices, and a gRPC API:

Tink

Tink is the short-hand name for the tink-server and tink-worker. tink-worker and tink-server communicate over gRPC, and are responsible for processing workflows. The CLI is the user-interactive piece for creating workflows and their building blocks, templates and hardware data.

Smee

Smee is Tinkerbell's DHCP server. It handles DHCP requests, hands out IPs, and serves up iPXE. It uses the Tinkerbell client to pull and push hardware data. It only responds to a predefined set of MAC addresses so it can be deployed in an existing network without interfering with existing DHCP infrastructure.

Hegel

Hegel is the metadata service used by Tinkerbell and OSIE. It collects data from both and transforms it into a JSON format to be consumed as metadata.

OSIE

OSIE is Tinkerbell's default an in-memory installation environment for bare metal. It installs operating systems and handles deprovisioning.

Hook

Hook is the newly introduced alternative to OSIE. It's the next iteration of the in-memory installation environment to handle operating system installation and deprovisioning.

PBnJ

PBnJ is an optional microservice that can communicate with baseboard management controllers (BMCs) to control power and boot settings.

Building

Use make help. The most interesting targets are make all (or just make) and make images. make all builds all the binaries for your host OS and CPU to enable running directly. make images will build all the binaries for Linux/x86_64 and build docker images with them.

Configuring OpenTelemetry

Rather than adding a bunch of command line options or a config file, OpenTelemetry is configured via environment variables. The most relevant ones are below, for others see https://github.com/equinix-labs/otel-init-go

Currently this is just for tracing, metrics needs to be discussed with the community.

Env Variable Required Default

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT n localhost

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE n false

OTEL_LOG_LEVEL n info

To work with a local opentelemetry-collector, try the following. For examples of how to set up the collector to relay to various services take a look at otel-cli

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=localhost:4317
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE=true
./cmd/tink-server/tink-server <stuff>

For complete documentation, please visit the Tinkerbell project hosted at tinkerbell.org.