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Kairos

Open Source

About Kairos

Kairos provides a Linux framework for managing the full lifecycle of machines, from installation to upgrades and recovery. It is designed to make large numbers of machines predictable, reproducible, and easy to operate over time. Kairos applies operational guarantees to Linux across environments from the edge to the datacenter. It is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project.

Products

Kairos: Immutable Linux framework managing machine lifecycle from installation to upgrades and recovery.
Hadron Linux: Minimal Linux base built for immutable deployments, secure boot paths, and image distribution in cloud-native operations.
kairos-lab: Tool for getting started with Kairos on macOS and Linux.
Bring Your Own OS (BYOI): Option to run Kairos with Ubuntu, Fedora, Alpine, and other base distributions.

Used for

Deploying reproducible images for cloud VMs and virtualized infrastructure.
Running on edge devices such as Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Orin with the same lifecycle model.
Running Kairos as an immutable Linux framework when a workload does not need Kubernetes.
Building Kairos images with FIPS 140-2 compliance packages enabled.
Using k0s as the Kubernetes distribution.

Who it is for

Used by organizations operating infrastructure across bare metal, edge, and distributed environments.

From Kairos's own website, read 2026-10-23. How we build listings.

How to evaluate Infrastructure as Code

This is how the CIOPages Research Team evaluates this category. It is not an assessment of Kairos. It comes from our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Platforms buyer guide.

25%

Language & Authoring Model

Declarative DSL (HCL) vs. general-purpose language (TypeScript, Python, Go, C#); readability for reviewers vs. expressive power (loops, conditionals, abstractions); module/component reuse and registry maturity; testing and IDE support; learning curve for the people who will actually write infrastructure

20%

State Management & Drift

Where state is stored, remote-state locking to prevent concurrent-apply corruption, state encryption and secret handling, plan/preview fidelity, drift detection and continuous reconciliation, import of existing resources, and blast-radius controls on apply

20%

Policy-as-Code & Governance

OPA/Rego and Sentinel support, pre-apply guardrails (block non-compliant resources, mandatory tags, region/cost limits), RBAC and SSO/SAML/SCIM, audit logging, approval workflows, and integration with cost-estimation and security scanning in the pipeline

15%

Provider Ecosystem & Portability

Breadth and quality of providers/resource coverage, day-one support for new cloud services, multi-cloud and on-prem reach, third-party SaaS providers, and how locked-in the resulting code is to one vendor or one cloud

10%

Collaboration & Workflow (TACOS)

Run orchestration and queuing, VCS/PR-driven plans, stack dependencies, self-service environments with TTL/ephemeral teardown, drift remediation workflows, and whether you self-host in CI (Atlantis-style) or buy a managed platform

10%

Licensing & Project Health

License (open-source MPL/Apache vs. source-available BUSL vs. proprietary), governance and ownership after recent M&A, release cadence and roadmap, community/foundation backing (CNCF, Linux Foundation), and how easily you could exit or fork

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