Metal³ (Metal Cube) just reached a major milestone in the CNCF journey. In this episode, we spoke with maintainers Kashif Misan Khan and Tommi Tanskanen about the project’s promotion from sandbox to incubating. Metal³ provides Kubernetes-native tooling for managing bare metal infrastructure, from provisioning operating systems to firmware upgrades, all through declarative APIs. With hundreds of contributors, over 185 releases, and strong backing from companies like Ericsson, Red Hat, and SUSE, the project is gaining maturity and adoption. The maintainers also shared what’s next for the community, including new API versions, multi-tenancy support, and better hardware support for workloads such as AI.

What you will learn in this episode

• Metal³’s CNCF incubation milestone: What it means for the project after five years in the sandbox.
• How Metal³ works: Using Kubernetes-native APIs to manage bare metal servers, from provisioning to lifecycle operations.
• Adoption and community growth: Contributions from 57+ organizations, 8,000 merged pull requests, and 185 releases.
• Key features users rely on: Cluster API integration, IP address management, node reuse, DHCP-less provisioning, and remediation tools.
• What’s next for the project: Work on multi-tenancy, new APIs, ARM support, and enhanced support for specialized hardware like GPUs.

Episode sponsored by Rootly.