This paper presents Ephemeral Kubernetes as a tool for deploying and re-deploying Kubernetes clusters on top of Warewulf.
Warewulf is a node management solution commonly utilized in HPC environments as it enables stateless node provisioning with nodes booting into operating system images that are provided via network booting by Warewulf.
The paper showcases how stateless nodes can be operated via Kubernetes, which typically expects nodes to be consistent.
The release of the source code includes instructions on how to set up Warewulf in an OpenStack environment in which it is able to boot into the prepared Warewulf images and install Kubernetes and set up a working Kubernetes cluster with 5 nodes in about 90 seconds.
Moreover, Ephemeral Kubernetes also supports automatically deploying high-availability Kubernetes clusters with multiple control plane nodes, which enable automatic failover.
The full details of the architecture and how the deployment process works can be found in the paper, which is available here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-025-07668-y
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About Me
Dr. Jonathan Decker
Jonathan is a scientific employee of the Georg-August-University of Göttingen and a postdoc researcher. He takes the role of a system architect and is focused on designing systems that enable new and novel ways of utilizing Cloud and HPC resources, while also being efficient, secure and scalable. Most notably, he strives to combine HPC with Kubernetes. In addition to conducting research in these topics, he handles university teaching activities.