While working at OVHCloud, I developed a feature called BYOI (Bring Your Own Image).
Bring Your Own Image technology lets you boot any cloud (or non-cloud) image on bare metal.
Not every vendor ships images that are fully agnostic yet (by that I mean ready for both UEFI and legacy boot), but with a bit of tinkering (packer), we can get something functional.
This marks a first step towards Hybrid IAC.
What does it actually do?
- API deployment (+automation)
- post-install scripting (+automation)
- transparent installation and system (+security)
- template customization (+security)
- custom nova boot (+tech)
One caveat: as mentioned above, not all images boot automatically yet. Several bug trackers are open across different vendors for issues at boot time, in grub config, during the init phase, and so on.
If you see these errors through KVM/IPMI, it actually means the deployment went well: the sticking point isn’t the deployment technology itself, but the image installed on the disks.