siderolabs-kubelet-fips

Chainguard Container for siderolabs-kubelet-fips

Sidero Labs kubelet, kubelet bundled with networking utilities for use in Talos Linux environments.

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/siderolabs-kubelet-fips:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The siderolabs-kubelet-fips image is the FIPS-enabled variant of the Chainguard Sidero Labs kubelet image (ghcr.io/siderolabs/kubelet), which packages the Kubernetes kubelet binary along with the networking utilities required by Talos Linux.

FIPS Support

This image includes the openssl-config-fipshardened package, which configures OpenSSL to operate in FIPS-compliant mode. All cryptographic operations performed by the kubelet and its dependencies use FIPS 140-2 validated algorithms.

For environments that do not require FIPS compliance, use the standard siderolabs-kubelet image instead.

For more information on Chainguard's FIPS-enabled images, refer to the FIPS documentation on Chainguard Academy.

Prerequisites

To work with the siderolabs-kubelet-fips image, you will need:

• Docker installed for running the image locally or inspecting its contents
• A Talos Linux cluster if deploying in production, as this kubelet image is designed for use within the Talos Linux environment
• Access to the Chainguard Registry. Refer to the Chainguard Registry overview for setup instructions

For more information on the Sidero Labs kubelet, refer to the upstream repository.

Getting Started

The siderolabs-kubelet-fips image is designed to run as the kubelet component within a Talos Linux node. It is not typically run standalone, but you can verify the image contents and kubelet version locally.

To check the kubelet version:

docker run --rm cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/siderolabs-kubelet-fips:latest --version

To verify that the required networking tools are bundled with the image:

docker run --rm --entrypoint <utility> cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/siderolabs-kubelet-fips:latest --version

Using with Talos Linux

In a Talos Linux environment, reference the Chainguard siderolabs-kubelet-fips image as the kubelet image in your machine configuration. For example, in a Talos machine config patch:

machine:
  kubelet:
    image: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/siderolabs-kubelet-fips:<version>

Replace <version> with the desired Kubernetes version tag (for example, 1.35). The image supports multiple Kubernetes versions, including 1.32 through 1.35.

Configuration

The siderolabs-kubelet-fips image uses /usr/local/bin/kubelet as its entrypoint. All kubelet configuration is passed via command-line flags or a kubelet configuration file, consistent with upstream Kubernetes kubelet behavior.

In a Talos Linux deployment, kubelet configuration is managed through the Talos machine configuration rather than directly on the container. Refer to the Talos kubelet configuration documentation for details on available settings.

Documentation and Resources

• Sidero Labs Kubelet GitHub Repository
• Talos Linux Documentation
• Talos Kubelet Configuration Reference
• Kubernetes Kubelet Documentation
• Chainguard Academy: FIPS-Enabled Images
• Chainguard Academy: Overview of Chainguard Containers

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.