All the younger engineers I talk to think you would need to be Albert Einstein to bootstrap a bare metal server.
As someone who made a living doing this at scale, where we would build a new datacenter every 2-4 weeks using 100% open source or off the shelf tools, I completely disagree.
I think PXE booting some servers and running a binary on them is 90% easier than most container orchestration engines, Kubernetes control plane, and all the other problems engineers seem to have invented for themselves. I also think it’s almost always much more performant. Engineers don’t have an intuition to realize that their XXLarge-SuperDuper instance is actually a 5 year old Xeon they’re sharing with 4 other customers. Cloud Prociders obfuscate this as much as possible, and charge a King’s ransom if you want modern, dedicated hardware.
But reproducible infrastructure as code is just orthogonal to that: everything from Salt to Nix is credible in that role.
Containerizing on top of a Xen hypervisor never made sense to me.