When I was working at OVHCloud company, I’ve developed a feature called BYOI (Bring Your Own Image).
Bring Your Own Image technology allows you to boot any cloud (or not) images on a baremetal.
Even if today not all editors are ready to provide completely agnostic images (and I mean UEFI ready and/or legacy boot), by triturating (packer) a bit the whole, we can have something functional.
This mark the first step towards the Hybrid IAC.
What does it really do?
- API deployment (+automation)
- post-install scripting (+automation)
- transparent installation and system (+security)
- template customization (+security)
- nova boot custom (+tech)
A little warning, as I said above, not all images are ready to boot automatically yet, there are many bug-tracks opened on different editors because of unwanted behaviors at boot time, grub config, init phase etc
If you see these errors via a KVM/IPMI, it means that the installation went well, but the sticking point is not the deployment technology itself, but the image installed on the disks.