Announcing factory.projectbluefin.io

[castrojo]

Digital Sovereignty Isn't Just for Nations

Sovereign platform for enthusiasts: Bluefin Server + K8s + argo + bootc + hive = "The Factory"

• Explore The Factory: factory.projectbluefin.io
• Soundtrack: Bluefin and the Forbidden Factory
• Source: projectbluefin/lab

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Why?

The Factory is the cloud-native toolchain we use to build Bluefin. It is 100% self-hostable, built from source, and reproducible. The idea is to move past delivering just a deliverable. Customers want the entire enchilada, including the cookbook.

Users should be able to monitor the OS as it's being built and learn about the process:

• Agents need to be coordinated in the factory (Hive)
• Contributors need ways to donate work to Bluefin:
• All sources should be tracked and maintained and built in the factory itself.

What is The Factory?

Surprise! It's just Kubernetes:

• Stack: k8s + KubeStellar + Argo CD + bootc + Harbor + BuildStream 2 + Hive
• Unofficial collaboration with Red Hat: Proving that "dark factories" work for operating systems.
• Fedora Hummingbird Factory: Shooting for a public demo meeting on July 23.
• Bluefin will serve as an FSDK version of this pattern—"Sherman, would you be the OpenShift to my Kubernetes?"

[znmeb]

'100% Self hostable, from source, reproduceable."

What's the total hardware cost if someone wants to build one of these? How many watts does it draw when all the cores are doing something?

[castrojo]

It's not a thing you buy you run it on a computer, whatever time it takes to make bluefin now on the hardware is probably the same.

[sprintcowboy]

Is this just to test the images or does it also make the images?
Or will the images still be made on github?

[castrojo]

Both, but we'll make the production images on github.

[passthejoe]

s/reproduceable/reproducible

s/100% Self hostable/100% self-hostable

[dlicois]

Can't wait to lobby this to the EU Linux guys

[castrojo]

KubeCon EU in Amsterdam this past year was 13,500 people. The largest open source conference of all time. This factory is composed of the CNCF Projects represented by that community. It's all in the stats I'm not making it up. I would struggle to find something more European than this thing. Heh.

I find the EU Linux thing interesting because all the discourse is people arguing about distros and I'm trying to figure out what the plan is. I don't get it. Also I am comically American so I'm sure other people have better ideas. And at the end of the day Amutable has the best plan because that's just upstream linux/systemd in a pure form.

I think the difference with buildstream is the final assembly of the upstream is done locally without the intermediary. Sure CentOS is a global project too. But if I can get python from python and all my components from upstream without the middle vendor why not? In the past you could argue "because it's much harder to do it yourself, you NEED distros." But it's 2026, it's actually harder to deal with another org. If you know what software you need why do I need another org. Or a huge distro thing? This is yaml and cron jobs of things that already exist!

We have all of this for years, none of what we're doing is new it's just applying k8s to the desktop. Which I also think is ironic because Europe's leadership in cloud native is pretty epic haha. Someone could just pay Kubermatic to set up a small cluster and it could serve the entire continent no problem and we'd be done!