The k0smotron Big Bang Benchmark

With k0smotron, every workload cluster gets a Kubernetes control plane that runs as pods inside a management cluster. Hosted control planes (HCPs) become ordinary Kubernetes workloads: schedulable, patchable, killable like any other Deployment. The tradeoff is that the management cluster pays the bill. Ten HCPs cost almost nothing. A hundred is a different story. Storage backends, pod limits, watch delivery, and k0smotron reconciliation all start to matter at the same time, and the question is which one cracks first. ...

May 5, 2026 · 16 min · Alexey Makhov

K0smotron v1.7.0 Release: Federated Hosted Control Planes

It’s been a while since our last k0smotron update, but the project has been evolving at full speed. Over the past few months, we’ve worked on strengthening k0smotron both as a standalone solution and as a first-class citizen within Cluster API. Along the way, we’ve also expanded k0smotron’s own API so it can support a wider range of use cases. One example is the new customUserData field, which gives you direct control over how your VMs are prepared to run k0s. This makes it possible to adapt cluster startup to very specific requirements. And this is only the beginning, support for Ignition as an alternative bootstrapping method is planned for the next minor release, further extending bootstrap configuration flexibility. ...

September 26, 2025 · 5 min · Adrian Pedriza