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 and Openstack. It can easily 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.