Out of curiosity, what sorts of issues are you having? I don't have much experience specifically with Ubuntu on bare metal, but I find kickstart easier to under

Out of curiosity, what sorts of issues are you having? I don't have much experience specifically with Ubuntu on bare metal, but I find kickstart easier to understand and use compared to preseed, for consistent bare-metal installations. I think there's an OpenStack project for provisioning bare metal servers via an API from images; I wonder how that's doing nowadays. Puppet is pretty good for configuration management when your systems do actually require the occasional change instead of just being continuously redeployed. Maybe there are people who rebuild their database servers every hour via CI, but I'd rather not. "Immutable infra" is definitely not the default state of things in DevOps land either. Often people talking about how their infra is immutable just conveniently ignore the parts that aren't. The data has to live somewhere.