>I'm really glad to see CoreOS taking this path, forged by the likes of VMware's ESXi and Joyent's SmartOS. It truly is the only way to run scalable infrastructure.

I find comments like these amusing. Sysadmins have been using PXE to boot servers... for quite some time now. Long before joyent existed, and long before VMware was something you'd seriously run a server under. (vmware came about around the time of the 2.1 version of the PXE standard, which was when I was first getting my feet wet; I didn't seriously start using pxe until the early oughts.)

Hell, /I/ built a nfs/pxe diskless cluster before joyent existed. As part of that, I demo'd a 'initrd only' system like this coreos thing, only we were using FreeBSD. We ended up going with / on nfs; it was way easier to update.

That said, I'm not knocking CoreOS; I might even use this. Maintaining your own bootable initrd with root filesystem is work. I currently use distro 'rescue images' (for centos, at least, you append 'rescue' to the installer, and it downloads a small initrd /... but it's less than optimal.)

I mean, I'm not shitting on joyent, either; I think most of the value they bring is managing this shit ongoing, which is not a trivial amount of work. I mean, the whole idea behind companies like Joyent is to make is so you don't need a me screwing with your dhcp server, and there's value in that. I'm grouchy and charge a lot of money.