When discovering gpxe/ipxe it got real interesting - now we could make web calls in pxe boot mode that let us automatically select os image based on asset tag from our cmdb. Role based app deployments to servers, and app streamed to clients. Those were the days… We built ci/cd not even knowing it was a thing.
When cloud started to be pushed I was like: “so pretty much what we’ve built here” (barring the promise of elastic scaling - we had barcodes preped from vendor batched to cmdb before delivery though). I wasn’t yet aware that most places didn’t use software to manage compute, end to end.
This is actually how we were booting our linux cluster nodes for the ATLAS project for the LHC while I worked at a physics lab.
So when I wanted a clean slate, I would:
- turn on laptop
- reboot client machine
- make a coffee (or two)
- there is no step four.
I've wanted to replicate that kind of thing at home or work ever since but with cloud tech it's just not necessary (but I hear often done by the cloud providers themselves) and at home it doesn't quite solve any real-world problems.