Tinkerbell is a tool that enables users to provision and manage bare metal. It helps standardize infrastructure and application management using the API-centric configuration and automation approach that was pioneered by the Kubernetes community.
It is made up of four major components:
- a DHCP server called Boots,
- a metadata service called Hegel,
- an in-memory operating system installation environment called OSIE,
- and a workflow engine called Tink.
There is an optional fifth component for VM and server setups, a Power and Boot service for communicating with BMCs.
In addition to those components, there are three infrastructure pieces that make up Tinkerbell. It uses PostgreSQL as a data store, a local image repository for storing action images used in workflows, and NGINX is used as a web server that can be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache.
Tinkerbell was created by Equinix Metal.
The project is available on GitHub here.
