kMetal is a bare metal Kubernetes platform from Clastix. It installs directly on physical servers and brings bare metal provisioning, virtualization, networking, and node operating system lifecycle together under a single cloud native control plane.
kMetal is built for organizations that run Kubernetes on hardware they own and want a self-service experience without a separate virtualization suite underneath it. Every layer of the platform is expressed as a Kubernetes resource, so the infrastructure itself can be defined in Git, versioned, and reconciled through the same GitOps workflow used for applications. Provisioning servers, defining a tenant network, pinning a kernel version, and rolling out a cluster upgrade are all API operations against one control plane.
Virtualization is provided natively through kernel-based KVM, with no separate hypervisor layer. Workloads that need full hardware performance run on dedicated bare metal worker nodes, and workloads that need virtual machine isolation run on lightweight KVM nodes provisioned by the same platform. One team operates Kubernetes and virtualization together, through one API and one set of tools.
Multi-tenancy is enforced at the infrastructure boundary rather than by namespace convention. Each tenant receives a dedicated Kubernetes control plane, a software-defined network with no shared broadcast domain, and quotas and policies applied at the tenant boundary. Control planes run as pods rather than on servers dedicated to each cluster, removing the per-cluster overhead that makes large fleets costly to operate. Teams request clusters through a self-service interface, not a provisioning ticket.
Node operating systems are managed declaratively. An operator describes the required node image, for example a kernel version or accelerator driver set, as a Kubernetes object, and kMetal builds it, signs it, and rolls it out across the fleet through the same reconciliation loop used for workloads. Cluster profiles and add-ons are templated the same way, keeping configuration consistent across teams and sites and making fleets of hundreds of clusters manageable as one set of resources.
kMetal is assembled from established open source cloud native projects rather than proprietary forks, and the clusters it delivers are CNCF-conformant upstream Kubernetes. Existing ecosystem tooling, including ingress controllers, service meshes, container registries, and CI/CD runners, runs on them without modification.
Typical deployments include private cloud platforms in enterprises, Kubernetes as a service from cloud and managed service providers, and GPU platforms for AI workloads that require tenant isolation and driver-specific node images. kMetal is designed for Kubernetes infrastructure specifically, so general-purpose virtual machine workloads remain outside its scope. It can also run alongside an existing virtualization platform, taking on the Kubernetes estate while other workloads stay where they are.
