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Why We Chose Flatcar Linux for Rafay MKS Over Talos

When it came to selecting an immutable operating system for Rafay's Kubernetes Distribution (Rafay MKS), we found ourselves evaluating two strong contenders: Talos and Flatcar Linux. Both offered immutability and a focus on running containers, but in the end, Flatcar Linux won out for our needs. In this blog, we provide a deeper look into why we made that choice, and how the pros and cons stacked up.

The Advantages of Flatcar Linux

1. Familiar Tooling and Broader Compatibility

One of the standout reasons we leaned towards Flatcar Linux is its relative familiarity. Flatcar is essentially a continuation of the CoreOS project. This means it retains a lot of the ecosystem and tooling that many of our team members were already comfortable with. This meant our customers could integrate it into their existing processes without a steep learning curve.

The ability to use familiar tools and have a bit more flexibility with SSH when absolutely necessary gave us confidence in day-to-day operations.

2. Larger Community and Ecosystem Support

Flatcar has a broader user base and a longer lineage, which means more community resources, forums, and third-party integrations. For a market leading Kubernetes Management Platform like Rafay and more importantly, for our enterprise customers, having a wealth of community knowledge to tap into is a big plus. It gave us and our customers confidence that we’ll find solutions quickly and have more options for extending or customizing our environment as needed.

3. Flexibility and Accessibility

While immutability is a core feature of both OSes, Flatcar strikes a balance by still allowing certain levels of direct access when needed. This is critical for our customer's operations teams, who occasionally need to run diagnostics or deal with unexpected issues that are easier to handle with a little more flexibility.

Flatcar Linux provides a nice middle ground between total lockdown and the kind of access we sometimes need for troubleshooting.

The Disadvantages of Talos in Our Context

We also looked carefully at some of the disadvantages of Talos that our customers called out.

1. Steeper Learning Curve

Talos is incredibly secure and Kubernetes-focused, but that also means it’s quite different from traditional Linux environments. For our enterprise customers, this represented a significant learning curve. They need a solution that balanced security with usability, and Talos’s unique approach meant more training time and adjustment.

2. Niche Ecosystem

Talos, being a more niche and specialized OS, has a smaller ecosystem compared to Flatcar. While it’s certainly growing, we felt that the broader support and existing integrations in the Flatcar ecosystem would serve our customers better in the long run.

3. Limited Direct Access

Talos’s lack of SSH and its strict API-only model is a big win for security, but it also means less flexibility when our customers need to troubleshoot unusual problems. For them, having the ability to occasionally access the system directly was an operational benefit that they didn’t want to give up.

4. Vendor Support & Viability

When evaluating operating systems for Rafay MKS, long-term vendor support and ecosystem health played a critical role in our decision. Talos OS is primarily backed by a single company with a small core engineering team. While the team behind Talos is highly capable and deeply committed, this limited organizational footprint introduces some risks in terms of long-term sustainability, release cadence, and the ability to support a rapidly growing set of enterprise use cases.

On the other hand, Flatcar Linux benefits from what can be described as an entire “village” of sponsors and contributors. It is actively maintained by a large community of engineers from multiple organizations and enjoys support from companies like Microsoft, AWS, and Kinvolk contributors (before Kinvolk's acquisition by Microsoft). This diversity of sponsorship and contribution means that:

  • Development and security patching are not reliant on a single vendor.
  • Features evolve faster due to a broader contributor base.
  • Long-term viability is stronger thanks to multi-organization backing.

For Rafay, this multi-sponsor model provides greater confidence in the continuity, stability, and evolution of the platform over time, especially as our customer base scales and operational demands increase.

Conclusion

In the end, our choice of Flatcar Linux for Rafay MKS came down to achieving the right balance between security, operational flexibility, and ecosystem maturity. While Talos offers a highly secure, Kubernetes-focused design with a minimal attack surface, it introduces a steeper learning curve and fewer troubleshooting options for our customers.

Flatcar Linux, on the other hand, allows our customers to leverage their team's existing Linux expertise, integrate seamlessly with established tooling, and benefit from a larger, more active community. Its approach to immutability provided us with the stability and predictability we needed, while still allowing controlled flexibility when troubleshooting or performing diagnostics.

Ultimately, Flatcar aligns better with our multi-tenant Kubernetes strategy and enterprise-scale operational requirements at Rafay MKS, enabling us to deliver a secure, reliable, and maintainable platform for our customers.

For additional information, read our related blogs on Flatcar Linux.