[sour-taste]

I used to work at a company that built data centers. They were trying to get their software to appoint that you could turn up an entire data center from a laptop. Why? So that you could work with European companies and prove to regulators that there were no backdoors. It was a fascinating problem but very difficult. My team was only tangentially involved but we did some work to forward our data to a proxy that ensured that all our data was auditable and not sending stuff it shouldn't. I left before it finished but I heard it was scrapped as too difficult.

[technofiend]

Anecdotally I've used software that was capable of it if your hardware could be netbooted, preferably with pxe/ipxe. I used rackn and there's other vendors like maas with purportedly the same abilities.

RackN is good enough it'll let you build virtualization on top of bare metal and then keep going up the stack: building VMs, kubernetes, whatever. You just set up rules for pools, turn on dhcp and let auto discovered equipment take on roles based on the rules you set. Easy to do although I wouldn't envy anyone building a competitor from scratch.

[justahuman74]

There's a few prerequisites that make this all very realistic if the time is put in

* An LTE remote access box connected to a few switches management ports so you can configure the switches yourself

* Ensuring that the vendors pre-cable the racks and provide port-mapping data

* Ensuring that the vendors set the machines to PXE boot

* Ensuring the vendors double-check the list of MAC addresses of the HW provided for both in-band and oob

[qu1j0t3]

This is something like what Oxide Computer is trying to do, but of course you have to use their hardware to benefit.

https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer