Finally posted Tiburon on github

Tiburon specifically solves the problem of stateful vs stateless boots, roll forward/backwards in images, consistent booting with immutable images. Coupled with an image generator and a programmatic config environment (as in Nyble and other tools), you have the workings of the non storage/networking parts of a cloud or cluster manager.

The philosophy behind this has to do with the pain associated with config/OS drift, failed upgrades/roll backs, failed boot drives, etc. Tiburon provides you a mechanism such that if your machine can PXE boot, its entire boot process can be completely isolated from what is on the local disks (local state), or even the functionality of local disks. If you do not have any local storage in your cloud or cluster, why add extra expense for it, when you can boot systems that not only have no local physical storage, but can attach to EBS mechanisms as it boots, but not let failure of that attachment leave the system in an inoperable state (the root disk problem, which is linear in the number of physical/virtual machines). Remove cost, simplify, accelerate, and control the boot process.

See here. I did quite a bit of cleanup, and started efforts to document, write an installer, etc. Expect significant activity in the near term.

Tiburon is, in a nutshell, the tech I developed at Scalable Informatics to programmatically boot anything on anything. If you can dhcp and run pxe, you can run tiburon boot server. Think of it as a dhcp boot server on steroids. When coupled with a project like Nyble, you can build images for booting your own fleets, and deploy them easily. Tiburon is meant to be a hub for Nyble (and other) images.

Right now its hard to get it operational. I am writing an installer. Stay tuned!