You could also go full docker and experiment with docker swarm. I have little experience with swarm itself, but AWS ECS has deployment strategy. You could say you want 50 container instances on a fleet of 50 machines with deployment strategy of spreading across all machines and you would guarantee that every single machine is populated with a docker container. Maybe try to look for a similar functionality thinking about you bare metal machines as a single fleet of instances. Do you manage your containers configs with environment variables? I think docker also let's you share the hosts environment with the docker container, so you can pre provision the server with the necessary information and once the swarm is deployed, the container figures out what to do with the hosts env. Applying that to the spread across machines deployment strategy and you solve your problem.