Good news, everyone (especially me): the issue turned out to be both logical and... not so logical.

Formerly, we were booting the Talos nodes on a disk image coming from the Talos factory. That disk image had all the configuration we wanted; in particular, it had the "nocloud" flavor, meaning: "hey, I'm going to give you a bunch of information - including your IP address - through a particular way - in this case, a tiny filesystem on a virtual block device. But now, we're booting from an ISO image. We can't *run* from an ISO image (although, technically, since Talos is immutable... I guess we should be able to? I wonder if that's possible?), so in the Talos MachineConfig, we pass an "install" block to say, "hey, install Talos on this particular disk". And here, there is an "image" parameter, to tell which image you want to use.

Naively, I thought that omitting this parameter meant "infer the image from the ISO" (i.e., use a nocloud image). I was wrong! It picks a different image. In this case, the "metal" image. And the metal image doesn't give a damn about the nocloud metadata, and just does DHCP in that case. So it makes sense!

...But also... Since I booted from a *nocloud* image, why can't it default to a *nocloud* installer? No idea.

Anyways, I changed my MachineConfig template to include the correct image and now we're back in business. Clusters are up and running.

So now I can go back to writing docs and perhaps publishing this module, ... but also I need to pack for my trip to Tennessee. So we'll see :)

#talos #terraform #kubernetes