Private Clusters
Civo Bare Metal is alpha functionality. Bare-metal clusters managed by Konstruct are priced per the pricing page — no upcharge while in alpha.
Private clusters are Kubernetes clusters running on your own hardware. Once provisioned, they are managed by Konstruct like any other cluster: deploy from the GitOps catalog, attach environments, apply Helm and pipeline templates, and govern access with the same organizations and RBAC.
Cluster types
Colony provisions three cluster flavors onto discovered hardware:
| Type | Best for | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| Talos Linux | Production clusters | Immutable, API-driven Linux purpose-built for Kubernetes; single-node to HA (3 control plane + N workers) |
| K3s | Edge, dev/test, constrained hardware | Lightweight; ships with Flannel CNI, Traefik ingress, local-path storage, ServiceLB out of the box |
| CivoStack | Full cloud experience on your metal | Talos + the Civo Stack Engine: Cilium, distributed block storage (Mayastor), Ceph object/block storage, ingress, monitoring, Autopilot — the platform that runs the Civo public cloud |
Creation guides in the Colony docs: Talos · K3s · CivoStack
Declarative from end to end
A cluster is declared as a single TenantCluster resource — control plane replicas, worker pools, hardware references, Kubernetes version, and network CIDRs. The Colony operator generates the provisioning plans, PXE-boots the machines, bootstraps the cluster, and publishes the kubeconfig as a Secret when the cluster reaches Ready:
Planning → ProvisioningControlPlane → Bootstrapping → ProvisioningWorkers → WaitingForNodes → Ready
Day-2 operations follow the same model — add nodes by extending a worker pool, upgrade by bumping the version in the spec: Add nodes · Access clusters.
Storage and data-heavy workloads
For storage-intensive platforms, CivoStack clusters bring the storage stack Civo runs in production:
- Mayastor — high-performance distributed block storage across worker nodes
- Ceph (rook-ceph) — object storage (S3-compatible RGW) and block storage (RBD)
- External S3 tiering — S3-compatible object storage integration (e.g. Wasabi)
Multi-site and failover posture
Because every layer — hardware inventory, provisioning intent, cluster definitions, and the applications Konstruct delivers on top — is declared in Git, a cluster is rebuildable from its declarations. Combined with per-site isolation and multi-site management from one control plane, this is the foundation for cross-data-center failover designs: the desired state travels with the Git repository, not the building.