Machine Controller Manager (MCM) manages VMs as another kubernetes custom resource. It provides a declarative way to manage VMs. The current implementation supports AWS, GCP, Azure, Openstack, Packet and Alicloud. It can easily be extended to support other cloud providers as well.

Example of managing machine:

kubectl create/get/delete machine vm1

This branch implements the machine-api aspect of the cluster-api project. Cluster-api is heavily under development, and this branch of MCM will implement the APIs on the best-effort basis.

• In layman terms, it means user can expect MCM to process the machine-*.yamls [machine, machineset, machinedeployment] files defined in the cluster-api project.
• Technically it means, mcm-apis are imported from the cluster-api's machine-api.

Nodes/Machines/VMs are different terminologies used to represent similar things. We use these terms in the following way

1. VM: A virtual machine running on any cloud provider.
2. Node: Native kubernetes node objects. The objects you get to see when you do a "kubectl get nodes". Although nodes can be either physical/virtual machines, for the purposes of our discussions it refers to a VM.
3. Machine: A VM that is provisioned/managed by the Machine Controller Manager.

See the design documentation in the /docs/design repository, please find the design doc here.

See the documentation in the /docs repository, please find the index here.

• cluster-api branch of machine-controller-manager implements the machine-api aspect of the cluster-api project.
• Link: https://github.com/gardener/machine-controller-manager/tree/cluster-api
• Once cluster-api project gets stable, we may make master branch of MCM as well cluster-api compliant, with well-defined migration notes.