The Dancing Engineer who loves #BareMetal and #Butoh

[Dutch Lock Down Day Three Hundred Forty Seven]

Welcome to March 2021!

And when we start a new month, we dive into a new theme that combines dance with a technical focus – and March is for #BareMetal and #Butoh

But first the news:

bare-metal server is a computer server that hosts one tenant, or consumer, only.[1] The term is used for distinguishing between servers that can host multiple tenants and which utilize virtualisation and cloud hosting.[2] Such servers are used by a single consumer and are not shared between consumers. Each server may run any amount of work for a user, or have multiple simultaneous users, but they are dedicated entirely to the entity who is renting them. Unlike servers in a data center, they are not being shared between multiple customers.

Bare-metal servers are physical servers. Each server offered for rental is a distinct physical piece of hardware that is a functional server on its own. They are not virtual servers running in multiple pieces of shared hardware.

Butoh (舞踏Butō) is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. The art form is known to “resist fixity”[1] and be difficult to define; notably, founder Hijikata Tatsumi viewed the formalisation of butoh with “distress”.[2] Common features of the art form include playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and it is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.

Dance in Japan before World War II focused mainly on the beautiful aspects of the story only – even the villains and demons were beautiful in their own way. After the bombs, dancers wanted a way to express the full spectrum of human emotions – from the raw joy to the utter anguish – and Butoh was born.

Similarly, while cloud services offer an environment created via point and click, sometimes people want access to the full spectrum of hardware functionality. This CAN mean an admin experiences utter anguish, but once they master the required technologies, it CAN lead to raw joy.

Similar to Butoh, which is commonly performed with slow hyper-controlled motion, an admin may find that taking their time until they become more comfortable with the new environment preferable, but feel free to remove those training wheels and really take flight once you’ve gained your footing.

This month I’m exploring some of the repositories we’ve already migrated over to github.com/equinix like https://github.com/equinix/terraform-metal-openstack, https://github.com/equinix/terraform-metal-anthos-on-baremetal, and https://github.com/equinix/terraform-metal-openshift-on-baremetal and you can be sure that I’ll take my time until I reach that incredible joy of a well running bare metal system.


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