Bare Metal is Datum's customer-facing machine service at metal.datumapis.com.
Fleet manages physical infrastructure at fleet.datumapis.com; the intended
internal handoff API uses coordination.fleet.datumapis.com.
Fleet manages owned and rented infrastructure. It tracks equipment, allocates machines, installs operating systems, and supports managed clusters and node services. Each subsystem owns its resources and controls changes to them.
Fleet is under development. This repository contains the service design, alpha APIs, lifecycle libraries, and synthetic validation environments. Production integration and real provider support are not complete; the production manager rejects work that requires those integrations and makes no provider changes. See the implementation status for the implemented subset and remaining gaps.
- Plan, register, and verify physical infrastructure and its connections.
- Publish machine classes into eligible projects and allocate provider-owned capacity through one shared allocator.
- Install supported operating systems and provide allocation-scoped networking, power, console access, and safe release for standalone customers.
- Manage cluster membership, logical node identity, configuration, and replacement using the same machine allocation and installation services.
- Place platform node services, such as Private DNS resolvers, on managed nodes and incorporate their readiness into consumer placement gates.
The first bare-metal release must exercise a standalone customer workload on a qualified OS other than Talos, without requiring a managed cluster or an ongoing guest agent. Provisioning engines and provider integrations remain pluggable.
Start with the product overview and documentation guide to understand who Fleet serves, how its lifecycle fits together, and what exists today. Then choose a topic:
| Topic | What you will find |
|---|---|
| Functionality | Capabilities, customer journeys, and API contracts |
| Architecture | Subsystems, ownership boundaries, and design rationale |
| Operations | Local validation, deployment packaging, and acceptance |
| Troubleshooting | Expected limitations, diagnostic entry points, and safe recovery boundaries |
The Bare Metal CLI enhancement proposes
datumctl metal discovery, machine management, and safe recovery workflows.
Contributors should also read the repository guidance and implementation roadmap.