Bare metal as a platform primitive: Treating physical servers like cloud resources

The cloud-native ecosystem has made spinning up a VM or container trivial. Bare metal, by contrast, is still treated as artisanal infrastructure: provisioned manually, outside the IDP, and largely invisible to platform tooling. But it does not have to be. This talk walks through how platform teams can apply the same principles they use for cloud resources, such as declarative configuration, API-driven provisioning, cloud-init bootstrapping, and GitOps workflows, to physical servers. It covers the key integration points, where the abstractions break down, and how to expose bare metal as a self-service resource without compromising platform reliability guarantees.