IPA is a fantastic idea. Some questions:<p>1) I am actually curious how IPA is deployed to the ramdisks. Any pointers?<p>2) The turn around time for provisioning is now dependent on download speed etc. When provisioning batches this could be a problem, right?<p>3)Did you use any kind of CDN (for image persistence) when dealing with provisioning in different availability zones?<p>4) Does IPA also implement SSL/Auth?
Do you plan to offer lower-end OnMetal nodes? For example, 16 GB of RAM, a quad-core Xeon E3 processor, and a 256 GB SSD? Presumably you could put several such nodes in one chassis to make that kind of configuration economical.
Not directly related to the article, but asking here: what did you use to make those diagrams? It looks like the Unicode box drawing characters, but I was wondering if it was from a tool or handcrafted.