What is Warewulf with Jonathon Anderson and Jim Walker
In this short conversation, CIQ's Jim Walker asks Jonathon Anderson to start from the basics: what is Warewulf? Anderson describes it as a stateless cluster provisioning system that historically targets traditional on-premises research HPC clusters and applies equally well to modern AI and machine learning clusters. It is Linux only, and it fits any environment where many nodes should be broadly the same or identical, which is exactly what an HPC cluster looks like.
Walker, who comes from a Kubernetes background, notes the crowd of provisioning tools in that space and welcomes an open source approach. Anderson frames Warewulf's real value as fighting configuration drift: in the pets versus cattle analogy, Warewulf keeps nodes identical because none of them carries persistent state. You develop one image, and Warewulf builds, manages and provisions it out to your cluster resources.
Key takeaways
- Warewulf is a stateless cluster provisioning system aimed at traditional on-premises research HPC and equally applicable to AI and ML clusters.
- It is Linux only and fits any environment where many nodes should be broadly identical, which describes an HPC cluster.
- Because nodes carry no persistent state, Warewulf prevents configuration drift and keeps the fleet identical, like cattle rather than pets.
- At its core Warewulf builds, manages and provisions images out to compute or cluster resources.
Questions this video answers
What is Warewulf?
Warewulf is an open source, stateless cluster provisioning system. It builds, manages and provisions node images out to compute resources, historically for traditional on-premises HPC clusters and increasingly for AI and machine learning clusters. Because nodes hold no persistent state, every node boots identical to its peers, which eliminates configuration drift.
This video is part of the Warewulf Pro playlist. Browse every CIQ video by product and topic.
Transcript
um Jonathan what let's just start at the very Basics uh just to give everybody a baseline here what is Warewulf sure so Warewulf is a cluster provisioning system a stateless cluster provisioning system that's kind of primarily and historically uh targeting kind of the traditional research high performance Computing cluster um and is absolutely applicable to kind of a more modern AIML cluster as well um um but it works in that kind of more traditional especially on Prem cluster uh Paradigm more than what you might think of with a cloud computing Paradigm but we've been successful with it in other contexts too the kind of most
esoteric is that we ran a a sort of things like I mean I you know anything anything impossible or is there just some things that just wouldn't be a fit for Warewulf John so I mean it's it's Linux only for one uh but really any Linux environment where you want to run many nodes where they're broadly the same or identical um that that's where Warewulf is a good fit and so that's absolutely what kind of the HBC cluster looks like yeah it seems like there's a I don't know about 110 different kind of these uh you know kubernetes provisioning tools these days you know and
that's why I kind of went there I I'm an old you know kubernetes person so like uh it's it's it's interesting to hear because yeah I mean I think doing it in open source is the way to do it you know the the big thing in my mind that Warewulf really helps with in and thinking as uh an HBC CIS adman in a past life who wish wishes that I had had access to the current generation of Warewulf it's all about configuration drift and so one one thing that like the cloud native guys like to talk about is Pets versus cattle whether your servers are
kind of bespoke individual creatures that you kind of tailor and and care for individually or if it's just a big Fleet uh or or flock of things um that all behave identically and Warewulf helps make things more identical by virtue of them not having persistent State per node so you just develop an image so ultimately Warewulf is a system for building and managing and provisioning images out to compute resources or really cluster resources
Built for scale. Chosen by the world’s best.
2.75M+
Rocky Linux instances
Being used world wide
90%
Of fortune 100 companies
Use CIQ supported technologies
250k
Avg. monthly downloads
Rocky Linux
9
Enterprise products
Spanning the kernel to the orchestrator
Have questions about your infrastructure?
Talk to a CIQ engineer about Rocky Linux, HPC, and AI infrastructure.