Talos 1.14 made me rethink where the Talos boundary actually is

I've been running Talos in my homelab for a while, and my mental model has always been pretty simple:

Hardware → Talos → Kubernetes → Workloads

Talos owns the machine lifecycle. Kubernetes owns the workload lifecycle.

Looking at 1.14 together with the Hypervisor announcement, I'm starting to wonder whether that model is becoming too simple.

Native BGP, secure DNS configuration and the expanding configuration model are interesting individually, but the taloscontainers boundary caught my attention in particular. And the Hypervisor announcement takes the idea much further: Kubernetes, VMs and standalone containers potentially sitting above the same Talos infrastructure layer.

What I like about the direction is that "minimal" doesn't necessarily have to mean "does fewer things."

It could mean fewer ways to manage those things.

The part I don't know yet is whether that remains true once Talos starts owning VM lifecycle, placement, storage and networking. That's where the architecture becomes much more interesting.

I wrote down my current architecture hypothesis before the Hypervisor becomes testable:

https://medium.com/@mmelchers75/talos-is-becoming-more-than-a-kubernetes-os-and-that-changes-the-architecture-ed6a26874080

Once there's an alpha I want to put it into the same Architecture Engineering Lab I've been using for Talos/Kubernetes and start breaking things.

At the moment the honest conclusion is simply: interesting architecture, not enough evidence yet.

I'd be interested in how other Talos users see this direction.