// the find
poseidon/typhoon
Minimal and free Kubernetes distribution with Terraform
Typhoon is a Terraform-based Kubernetes distribution that provisions production-grade clusters on AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean, or bare metal using Fedora CoreOS or Flatcar Linux. It ships upstream Kubernetes with minimal opinions: Cilium or flannel networking, etcd on-cluster with TLS, SELinux enforcing. Aimed at operators who want reproducible clusters they actually understand, not a managed black box.
Genuine minimalism enforced by policy — no in-place upgrades, no kitchen-sink options, which means the surface area stays auditable. Butane/Ignition config for node bootstrapping is the right call: immutable OS images with declarative configuration instead of configuration drift via Ansible/cloud-init. Multi-platform support is real and actively maintained — AWS, GCP, and bare metal are all stable, not token checkboxes. The social contract (no telemetry, no vendor lock-in, CNCF-certified upstream K8s) is spelled out explicitly and baked into module design.
No in-place upgrade path is a principled choice but it means cluster replacement is the only upgrade strategy — operationally painful when you have stateful workloads and a small team. Azure and ARM64 variants are alpha, so if those are your targets you're signing up to be an early tester. The addons (Cilium, CoreDNS, flannel) are Terraform modules rather than proper lifecycle-managed components, so Day-2 operations like updating CNI versions require manual Terraform runs with no rollback story. Single-maintainer project with ~2k stars: bus factor is real, and the GitHub Sponsors support model means sustainability depends on the author's personal time.