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Tinkerbell bare metal deployment

Fill 'Er Up!

Article from ADMIN 81/2024

By Martin Loschwitz

Tools that handle bare metal deployment are few and far between, but the free Tinkerbell program tackles this problem with a modern architecture that comes from the metal-as-a-service scene, allowing you to control the roll out through an API and configure systems with your automation tool of choice.

All of today's major vendors offer automated server installation and configuration options, but if you want to avoid being tied in to a distribution provider, you will run into major issues. Ignoring vendor-specific solutions, you are likely to search in vain for bare metal deployment tools. Although Foreman is the classic choice and niche solutions such as Orcharhino also offer a great deal of functionality, they are not considered genuine candidates because many of the applications available are either very narrowly focused on individual areas of use or have sprawled so massively over the years that introducing them is virtually impossible. The developers at Tinkerbell [1] are looking to change this difficulty and have launched a collection of tools that promise modern bare metal deployment.

Rack It

The IT industry has changed fundamentally now that individual computing units designed to fit in the standard rack structures of data centers and server rooms (1U servers) have become so powerful that their hardware is not leveraged to its full potential just running individual programs. Virtualization has been the gold standard for nigh on 20 years, whether in the form of virtual machines or containers.

The rules of the game have changed fundamentally in the corporate landscape, not least because of the principles of cloud computing and cloud native architecture: Customers increasingly expect IT service providers to be – first and foremost – platform operators. Today's customers consume CPU and RAM in a far more dynamic way than was the case just five years ago, making use of the possibility of tasking highly specialized service providers with the creation of environments that can then run on any platform.

Thus, the day-to-day challenges faced by platform providers are fundamentally different from those they faced in the past.

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