In early 2019, Ericsson began exploring how to provision Kubernetes clusters directly on bare metal. Around KubeCon EU that year, it became clear that RedHat shared this interest in bare-metal provisioning, especially through leveraging Kubernetes-native APIs. RedHat had created few months earlier theMetal3 project with the goal of bringing true bare-metal management into the cloud-native ecosystem.

Ericsson and RedHat were early pioneers in this space and continued to co-develop Metal3, bringing together deep experience from working with bare metal in the OpenStack world. Early in its development, Metal3 integrated the OpenStack Ironic project, providing a shared foundation for hardware control across both communities.

Metal3 was accepted as a CNCF Sandbox project on September 8, 2020 and with that it became part of the CNCF ecosystem and started to follow the guidance and releases from the community. Fast forward to today, and Metal3 has become a cornerstone technology for cloud-native 5G infrastructure deployments. We're proud to announce—together with project maintainers —that Metal3 has now matured into an Incubating project within the ecosystem.

The project announcement is here.

Ericsson remains committed to driving the success of Metal3 together with the growing community of adopters worldwide.