This is my main issue with it right now, I'm wasting a whole physical disk in one of my home lab machines because Talos demands control over a full disk for its uses.

This is one of the more annoying problems with any "immutable" distro (or at least the ones I've tried). They demand a very specific partition layout that basically forces you to devote a whole disk to them, which as you said in a cloud environment (or any other environment where VMs are used in place of physical machines) doesn't matter, but ends up mattering a lot when using physical machines.

I’m curious on your use case. I’ve always had boot disk or boot disk array separate from any data array.

Are you referring to things like a home directory?

I’m referring to a server without a dedicated boot disk. This is not especially rare.

On an edge-style machine, you generally have a very limited number of M.2 slots, and dedicating one to a boot device uses up potentially 100% of your potential storage capacity, not to mention that an extra drive would be a non negligible fraction of total cost.

On modern servers, there may not be a usable SATA controller, and NVMe usually costs 4 PCIe lanes. Those aren’t free. You also end up paying the absurd OEM premium for an extra disk if you go with a big name OEM. Sadly, there is no industry standard cheap, reliable boot device standard, at least as far as I’ve ever seen. Maybe someone should push USB3 for this use case — the price is certainly right, and performance is likely just fine.

Server machines usually came with an SD-card slot on the board (and with ability to boot from it). This was often used for ESXi-like environments, which also required dedicated device for themselves.

There are also SATA-DOMs or USB-DOMs. You could use one of these modules with your machine.

is there a reason you can't just boot from usb? it sounds like the perfect match. I've built immutable bootsticks in the past that run in ram only (but with other distros). hetzner for instance lets you rent usb-sticks for their dedicated servers

FWIW, it’s been a little while since I’ve messed with the low-level details of BIOS/UEFI to kernel+united to USB root disk handoff, but I’m always slightly concerned that the system will mess up and hand off to the wrong device. For a system that uses USB for anything else, this opens up an attack/screwup vector in which the wrong disk gets used, leading to all manner of problems.

Also, an external dangly thing is asking for trouble (getting dislodged). An internal device solves this.

In any case, the Talos people seem to recognize this as a problem and are working on it.

fwiw an internal usb slot isn't unheard of on server-class motherboards.

I've leaned into it: all application state is on ephemeral storage and its constantly replicated "off-site" to a NAS running minio.

To accomplish this, I have restricted myself to SQLite as storage and use Litestream for replication. On start, Litestream reconstructs the last known state before the application starts. [Source](https://github.com/LukasKnuth/homeserver/blob/912cbc0111e44d...)

It works very well for my workloads (user interaction driven web apps) but there are theoretical situations in which data loss can occurr.

You need to store data somewhere. If you’re willing to have that location be off-site and to pay for remote storage and possibly egress, and you’re okay with your local installation not coming up if the off-site storage is inaccessible and with the latency involved in bringing your on-site data back, fine.

Of course, if you really lean in to a complete lack of local persistent state and you configure your network or some other critical service like this, good luck recovering from an upgrade and complete loss of ephemeral state.

I'm not sure I understand your second point. Yes, if the external replication target is unavailable, I can't bring my local service back online. Same goes for if the replication target becomes unavailable and I don't realize it, there is potential for a lot of data to be lost if the application restarts.

For my personal usecase this is fine. I also have monitoring setup to look for just this case. It's a tradeoff between resilience and simplicity that works for some use cases - mine included.

My second point is that, in a setup of any complexity, a black start is nontrivial. You have a network, with routes, DNS config, maybe VLANs, maybe a whole SDN. If that’s down because the machines running it are trying to pull their own configuration over the network, it won’t come back up. You can get pretty far into the weeds with situations like this.

Facebook supposedly got locked out of their own datacenter due to a network outage preventing the access control system from accessing whatever service it needed to allow anyone to open the door.

I see what you mean. For my case, the network is much simpler. I'm also fine if an unavailable replication target means I can't start an application.

The upside of my solution is that there is no scheduling requirement on which node the PVC was initially created. There is also a certain guarantee that I have a working, recent backup of the application data. Starting from scratch every time is also basically a backup recovery operation. It gives me confidence that there is a recent backup which is restorable.

This is worrying because I am just in the process of migrating old CentOS clusters to Talos and we need one additional disk other than the system disk. It's used for the host based ceph cluster.

But if I read this correctly there shouldn't be an issue adding one blank disk to the Talos VM, the issue is only more granular disk and partitions management.

I'd suggest to run it on top a virtualization environment, like Proxmox. That solves a lot of problems, and not just related to Talos. Basically, you split k8s and the resource management, networking, disks, etc, as well as getting backup, migration, etc.

Just use PXE? Why use disk at all?

PXE seems like kind of a nightmare to manage. Seems better to just use Cloudinit or Ignition with proper Certificate management

With NetBoot.xyz, it’s just a DHCP server setting, setting up a TFTP server and very easy to set up. Much easier than dealing with a bunch of USB boot drives and keeping them up to date.

Machines with UEFI support http boot since around ~2017. Then you can forget special vulnerable server (tftp) and just use plain webserver, together with dns (and have it in different subnet, if necessary).