I’ve spent a lot of time doing that stuff at reasonable scale, now more than 20 years ago. Lot of fun!

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.