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SUSE Telco Cloud Documentation|Fully automated directed network provisioning|Introduction

48 Introduction

 

This chapter describes how to provision downstream clusters using Directed Network Provisioning, the supported provisioning method for SUSE Telco Cloud. Unlike Image-based Provisioning, this workflow keeps the OS image generic and drives all cluster-specific configuration from the management cluster, enabling consistent and fully automated deployments at scale across distributed sites.

Directed Network Provisioning is a fully automated, zero-touch workflow driven by the management cluster. Each bare-metal host is first pre-enrolled in Metal3 from the management cluster by registering its BMC credentials and hardware details. Once the host is racked, connected to the required networks, and powered on, the management cluster takes over: it provisions the OS using an EIB-generated base image via the out-of-band management interface, and deploys the full Kubernetes stack with all telco profiles applied, without any further manual intervention.

The management cluster automates the deployment of the following components on each downstream cluster node:

  • SUSE Linux Micro (Chapter 10, SUSE Linux Micro) (or SUSE Linux Micro RT for Real-Time kernel) as the operating system. Networking, storage, users, and kernel arguments can be customized depending on the use case.

  • RKE2 (Chapter 14, RKE2) as the Kubernetes distribution. The default CNI plug-in is Cilium. Other CNI combinations such as Cilium+Multus can be used depending on the use case.

  • (Optional) SUSE Storage (Chapter 15, SUSE Storage)

  • (Optional) SUSE Security (Chapter 16, SUSE Security)

  • (Optional) MetalLB as the load balancer for highly available multi-node clusters.

The following sections describe the different directed network provisioning workflows and some additional features that can be added to the provisioning process:

Note
Note

The following sections show how to prepare the different scenarios for the directed network provisioning workflow using SUSE Telco Cloud. For examples of the different configurations options for deployment (incl. air-gapped environments, DHCP and DHCP-less networks, private container registries, etc.), see the SUSE Telco Cloud repository.