The End of PXE Monoliths: Containerized Bare-Metal

⏱ 8 minNivel · Engineering blogApr 27 2026

Traditional PXE systems like WDS or FOG Project are often monolithic, hard to scale, and difficult to maintain. Coblyn "Vanguard" breaks this paradigm by containerizing every single component of the deployment stack.

Why Containers for Bare-Metal?

1. Isolation: Each service (DHCP, TFTP, HTTP, Backend, DB) runs in its own environment. A failure in the TFTP container won't crash your DHCP server.
2. Portability: Deploy the entire stack anywhere (Dev, Ops, Prod) with a single docker-compose.yml.
3. Immutability: Reverting to a known good state is as simple as changing a tag in your config.

The ISC Kea Advantage

By using ISC Kea through its REST API, Coblyn eliminates the need to manually edit text files for DHCP reservations. This allows for the unique Quarantine Sandbox system, where new devices are isolated at the software level until an admin approves them.

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Published on the Prisma Engineering Blog