A bare metal server, or other computing device, may be represented as a JSON file (extending the concept to infrastructure as code) containing hardware, firmware and software versions with links to a kickstarter file depending on the needs of an application, SKU type or some other criteria. Rather than a management node in an L2 network which has a DHCP server to IP lease and facilitate OS installation, a workflow then generates a bootstrap kernel which initializes the bare metal server with an IP address, VLAN, and network gateway which is used to reach out to the network to download and install a kernel, upgrade firmware for various hardware components like BIOS, BMC, NIC, RAID, SSD, NVME, FPGA, etc. The bootstrap kernel may further configure RAID and JBOD, flash custom images on hardware components and may further instruct the server to incrementally download and install an operating system.