From bare metal to cloud native with Elemental OS management at KubeCon North America 2025

We’re excited to announce the release of Elemental 1.7, it builds on our commitment to making cloud native operating system management as simple and declarative as Kubernetes itself.

Operating systems are the foundation of every Kubernetes cluster, yet managing them has often been treated as a separate domain from container orchestration. Elemental bridges that gap, enabling full-stack, cloud-native OS management powered by the open-source community. It gives platform teams the ability to manage OS lifecycles using familiar Kubernetes concepts and declarative image-based workflows.

Closing the Gap Between Kubernetes and OS Management

Running Kubernetes at scale often exposes a gap between how teams manage their clusters and how they manage the operating systems beneath them. Infrastructure and platform teams frequently use different tools, pipelines, and ownership models for updates, patching, and configuration, creating operational silos. When every environment from bare metal servers to edge devices has its own management process, maintaining consistency and security becomes difficult.

Elemental addresses this challenge by bringing OS management into the same declarative model used for Kubernetes itself. It applies familiar Kubernetes workflows to the operating system layer so the same tools and patterns that power your clusters can now automate your OS lifecycle as well. The result is a unified cloud native management experience that simplifies operations and reduces risk across every layer of your stack.

What’s New in Elemental 1.7

Elemental 1.7 introduces several key improvements, focusing on flexibility, security, and refined management:

Elemental 1.7 introduces several enhancements designed to simplify operations and improve consistency across environments. One of the top customer requests, cross-architecture image building, now allows teams to create build-image ISOs for multiple architectures. This enables greater deployment flexibility and supports diverse hardware environments.

Security remains a central focus. The new agent TLS enforcement strengthens data protection and ensures trusted communication between components in Rancher and Elemental. Labeling has also become more powerful and easier to use. With richer metadata, improved templates, and support for random label generation, Elemental 1.7 makes automation and organization simpler and more intuitive.

The new network state enhancements (Tech Preview), introduce Network Configurators such as nmc, nmstate, and nmconnections. These improve testing, reliability, and flexibility. Combined with IPAM and declarative networking, they move Elemental closer to production-grade network automation.

Elemental now aligns more closely with Kubernetes metadata, improving handling for charts, versioning, and ClusterIP use. This creates a smoother, more consistent experience across the stack. Platform dependencies have also been refreshed to boost performance, stability, and security across all supported environments.

• Cross-Architecture Image Building: This highly requested feature now gives you the power to create build-image ISOs for various architectures, offering greater deployment flexibility. This directly addresses customer feedback for broader hardware support.
• Enhanced Security with Agent TLS Enforcement: Strengthening the security of your communication with Rancher is paramount. With newly implemented Agent TLS Enforcement, your data is more secure than ever.
• Reworked and Improved Labels: We’ve refined our labeling system to provide richer information, enhanced templates, and robust support for randomly generated labels. This improvement aims to simplify organization and automation for our users.
• Network State Improvements: This release brings significant advancements to network management through the implementation of Network Configurators (nmc, nmstate, nmconnections). These provide better testing, improved stability, and the capability to utilize IPAM and Declarative Networking. Please note: While these specific network capabilities offer exciting potential, they are currently in Tech Preview and are not recommended for production usage. We are actively working to bring these features to a production-ready state and encourage feedback from early adopters.
• Kubernetes Metadata Alignment: Experience improved alignment with Kubernetes metadata, including information about chart naming and versioning, an enhanced security context, and efficient use of ClusterIP. This ensures a more seamless integration within your Kubernetes environments.
• Dependency Updates: We’ve performed an overall update of dependencies to ensure optimal performance, compatibility, and security across the platform.

Looking Ahead: What’s Next for Elemental

We’re already preparing for the release of Elemental 1.8, which will add support for SUSE Micro 6.2 as a target operating system, expanding compatibility and choice for enterprise deployments.

Beyond these incremental updates, Elemental is undergoing a major overhaul. We continue to listen to our customers and a significant update is in the works with Elemental 3, expanding on the work pioneered by Rancher OS management with the tools, concepts and innovations that you understand, adding support for more deployment types, use cases, and configurations.  We are committed to the ongoing development of Elemental and look forward to your feedback as we continue to evolve the platform to meet your needs.

For a comprehensive overview of all changes in Elemental 1.7, please refer to the full release notes here: Release Notes v1.7.3 

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