Talos is faster, lighter, and does what it is supposed to — and nothing else.
Janne Heino · Head of Nokia Global Services Cloud Architecture
The Talos Platform:Infrastructure that can’t drift, won’t fail an audit,
and makes upgrades a non-event, so engineers
ship the roadmap instead of fighting fires.
Running in production
Trusted by enterprise platform teams.
Talos was really our preferred edge OS. We found it provides us secure operations, flexible deployment options, and customizable builds.
Jeff Wright · Director of PM, Hardware · PowerFlex
Since deploying Talos, within six hours we can install a cluster and have it up and running. It gives us the confidence to stand behind deploying it to our customers.
Brian McCarthy · VP Engineering, DevOps & Infra · Berkshire Grey
We don’t need to ask the legacy teams to provide us with a modern solution to run Kubernetes. We’ve got our own out-of-the-box solution: Talos — and the magic happens.
Thomas Comtet · Senior Staff Engineer · SNCF
We can easily scale to hundreds of clusters. Omni is more than capable of that.
Paulo Araujo · Site Reliability Engineer · Promptly Health
Upgrades should be routine, not risky.
Every upgrade is a quiet bet that nothing else breaks. One CVE patch shouldn't put the whole fleet in doubt. With the Talos Platform, every upgrade is the same atomic swap, predictable from day zero to every day after.
Infrastructure that can't wander — or be wandered into.
Most fleets are held together by hand — and exposed in the gaps. The Talos Platform closes them through design choices that carry across clusters, sites, and time.
Minimal by design
Fewer than 50 binaries — just enough to run Kubernetes. Minimal attack surface, minimal CVEs.
API-only access
No SSH, no shell — every node interaction goes through a secured gRPC API with mutual TLS.
Immutable OS
Read-only and ephemeral — nothing is written to disk at runtime, nothing persists between reboots.
Secure by default
mTLS on all API access, CIS guidelines applied out of the box, FIPS 140-3 compliant.
Declarative configuration
Entire machine state is defined in a single YAML file — no config management tools needed.
Unified lifecycle
OS and Kubernetes upgrade together as one atomic, rollback-safe image.
Operational control that doesn't cost a team.
Upgrades, scaling, new sites? The fleet stays in shape. The team you'd normally need to keep things in line gets to work on something else.
Built in the open
Talos is what it is thanks to those who chose it before it was obvious.
- Talos LinuxOpen source · MPL 2.0 · forever
- Talos OmniSource-readable · BSL 1.1
- KubernetesCertified distribution
- CNCFSilver member
10,200+GitHub stars
314+Contributors
“I’m consistently being blown away by the amount of engineering that has gone into Talos Linux for running k8s easily and securely. As much as I don’t like drinking an individual company’s koolaid, so far this one’s lit.”
Sage Amethyst
@sageamethyst.rocks · X · Oct 25, 2025
Works with what you have.
Runs everywhere you need.
The Talos Platform owns the OS and lifecycle layers, and runs alongside the rest of your stack. Bare metal, virtualized, edge, sovereign, AI — wherever your workloads are.
Works with
- NVIDIA
- Cilium
- Rook
- Argo CD
- VMware
- Proxmox
- KubeVirt
- Prometheus
Where it runs
- Bare metal
- Virtualized
- Edge
- Air-gapped
- Sovereign
- AI
- FIPS 140-3 compliant builds
- CIS benchmarked
- SBOM on every release
- SOC 2 Type II compliant
