In this object reference, we introduce all objects that are specific for this provider integration. The naming of objects, servers, machines, etc. can be confusing. Without claiming to be consistent throughout these docs, we would like to give an overview of how we name things here.

First, there are some important counterparts of our objects and CAPI objects.

• HetznerCluster has CAPI's Cluster object.
• CAPI's Machine object is the counterpart of both HCloudMachine and HetznerBareMetalMachine.

These two are objects of the provider integration that are reconciled by the HCloudMachineController and the HetznerBareMetalMachineController respectively.

The HCloudMachineController checks whether there is a server in the HCloud API already and if not, buys/creates one that corresponds to a HCloudMachine object.

The HetznerBareMetalMachineController does not buy new bare metal machines, but instead consumes a host of the inventory of HetznerBareMetalHosts, which have a one-to-one relationship to Hetzner dedicated/root/bare metal servers that have been bought manually by the user.

Therefore, there is an important difference between the HCloudMachine object and a server in the HCloud API. For bare metal, we have even three terms: the HetznerBareMetalMachine object, the HetznerBareMetalHost object, and the actual bare metal server that can be accessed through Hetzner's robot API.