Dragonfly

Dragonfly is a bare-metal infrastructure management system that turns unconfigured hardware into usable infrastructure — automatically, securely, and quickly.

When you rack a new machine, Dragonfly answers: “What happens next?”

The Vision

Power on → Auto-discovered → OS assigned → Installed in 4 minutes → Ready

No manual intervention. No USB drives. No sitting at consoles typing IP addresses.

Key Features

• Automatic Discovery: Machines PXE boot and register themselves via the Mage agent
• Web UI: Beautiful interface for managing your metal
• Native Provisioning: Rust-based actions, no Docker overhead
• Fast Provisioning: ~4 minute OS installations
• Decoupled Architecture: Run Dragonfly anywhere — your laptop, a VM, or in-cluster
• Flexible Storage: Embedded ReDB (default) or Kubernetes etcd
• Multiple Power Control: IPMI, Redfish, Wake-on-LAN
• Proxmox Integration: Manage VMs alongside bare metal

How It Works

Dragonfly orchestrates the complete machine lifecycle:

1. Discovery — Machine PXE boots, Mage agent detects hardware and registers
2. Assignment — Operator chooses OS and role via web UI
3. Provisioning — Native actions execute: partition, image, configure, kexec
4. Ready — Machine boots into assigned OS, ready for use

Architecture

Dragonfly follows a decoupled, stateless design:

• ReDB or Kubernetes stores all state (Hardware, Workflows, Templates)
• Native Actions handle OS installation (no Docker containers)
• Dragonfly Server provides the web UI and orchestration logic
• Boot Services (DHCP, TFTP, iPXE) handle PXE infrastructure

This means Dragonfly can run on your laptop managing a remote datacenter, or inside Kubernetes managing bare metal in the same rack.

Deployment Modes