Ask HN: How do you manage on-prem servers?
What is the best way to (/how do you) set up on-premise servers to give end-user engineers a cloud-like experience (keeping track of which servers are in use, remote SSHes, network configs, CI/CD, etc)?
Are you trying to provision services and apps? Kubernetes. Are you trying to provision Virtual machines? have a look at rancher harvester. Are you trying to replicate server setup to make it unified? Ansible Are you trying to explicitly control servers with instructions? Terraform
SSH works in containers too, all you have to do is either open the ports or forward.
Once they finish their ipv6 features, Rancher Harvester is going to be one interesting beast for on-premise. You may setup your virtual machines with the regular kubernetes api (libvirt), provision storage throughout the network and could even dife into software defined everything.
If none of these words mean anything to you though, the most common way for smaller orgs is either ansible or terreaform. Dont complicate things just to make them shiny ;)
The most complex thing perhaps is to configure the storage encryption with LUKS or similar. You get that for free in the cloud if you don’t care about letting your cloud provider play with your private keys.
Pyinfra to manage and install software (I'm fed up with custom DSLs, pyinfra is pure python)
If you’re using Ubuntu it’s Pretty great. It does support custom Linux and windows images but the feature set isn’t as good for storage and network config etc and that doesn’t get as much focus as first party Ubuntu deployment. So if your primary OS is something else there may be better tailored solutions.
More generally there is a class of “metal” management solutions you can look at similar like Foreman and OpenStack Ironic that usually have some variation of PXE boot install. Hopefully some others can chime in with good examples or recommendations for those.
May help to share what your primary OS/Distro is and others you need to do.
I go to the data centre from time to time, mostly taking junior engineers for a sightseeing trip to show them how "the cloud" actually looks :-)
If you need colocation in London I can put you in touch.