You have to do that anyway? Most colocated data centers will provide you with network infrastructure to the wider internet, and managing a few SSH keys and is n

You have to do that anyway? Most colocated data centers will provide you with network infrastructure to the wider internet, and managing a few SSH keys and is not particularly time consuming or difficult. OS updates are incredibly easy to do and installing the OS is generally a one-time event. > As a once off thing I would also need to configure some other basic stuff like a VPC, security groups, gateways etc In a simple setup, you don't really need to do that either, except for a basic reverse proxy setup. > If I want my Supermicro/Quanta/Dell to boot from an image in a similar fashion I have to build the image, I have to host the image, Or just download the latest LTS Ubuntu image from their site and dd it to a USB drive. I've done it dozens of times for production systems. If you want to get fancy, you can do PXE boot, but it's IMO not worth it until you get past hundreds of servers. You really don't need to do this. > I have to make it available on the network, I have to configure DHCP So plug in the some cables and... change nothing in the settings? Pretty much every Linux OS image expects DHCP out of the box. You might need to configure a static IP if your DC doesn't provide a DHCP server for you, but realistically this isn't a problem. > I have to configure the BMC (and Redfish is probably not implemented quite right, lets be honest here), then I can boot from You still don't need to do this. Pretty much every BNC lets you directly upload an image to boot from one time. It's not something worth doing unless you're at a pretty massive scale.