A New Way to Deploy Images with Eikon

Those who deploy images at scale know the pain of managing and troubleshooting third-party tools like Canonical’s Curtin. Eikon, the new Digital Rebar image deployment feature, changes that. It replaces Curtin-based processes with something faster, clearer, and natively supported.

Eikon frees you from the assumptions and limitations built into an Ubuntu-first toolchain. Instead, you get a streamlined deployment system that supports a broader range of operating systems and gives you complete visibility into every step.

Why Replace Curtin Image Deploy?

Curtin, Canonical’s image deployment tool, is widely used for Ubuntu-based systems, but its design presents problems for broader use cases. While it was originally built as a general-purpose tool, Curtin has increasingly focused on Ubuntu-specific requirements, creating limitations for other operating systems.

Beyond that, image-deploy via Curtin offers little visibility into failures or progress, which can make troubleshooting difficult. Image-deploy relies on Curtin, which is maintained by Canonical for fixes. Because there are out of tree fixes, getting those fixes into upstream can often be a slow and uncertain process. Often, our RackN engineers’ patches face delays waiting for upstream approval, and we can’t guarantee those patches will actually get approved.

We developed Eikon to eliminate these pain points while maintaining backward compatibility with our existing image deployment workflow that uses Curtin in the backend. By bringing deployment logic in-house, RackN ensures faster issue resolution, cross-platform support, and full transparency into the deployment lifecycle.

How Eikon Works

Eikon simplifies and enhances image deployment through three core components:

1. Eikon Plan – A structured configuration (disks, partitions, RAID) that replaces Curtin’s flat config format. Eikon also supports conversion from existing Curtin configs to Eikon plans for quick implementation.

2. The Eikon Binary – A plugin binary that:

• Defines actual storage needed for image(s) and builds out filesystems according to specifications from the Eikon plan
• Lays down image(s) (including multi-distro Linux and Windows)

3. Task Automation – Addresses a variety of steps before, during, and after deployment:

• Identifies image setup, OS, and distro
• Readies for proper booting after image deploy, like configuring GRUB
• Initializes and sets up agent for future tasks like configuring hostname, SSH keys, etc., which reduces reliance on steps like cloud-init

Unlike Curtin, Eikon provides real-time visibility into the deployment process, allowing operators to pause, inspect, and modify configurations mid-deployment, saving time on large-scale rollouts.

Key Benefits Eikon Brings to the Image Deployment Process

Making Eikon wasn’t just about replacing Curtin, but also improving image deployment in several ways:

Faster Deployments

Eikon supports modern compression (like zstd), significantly reducing transfer times.

Broader OS Compatibility

Works with Windows (no WIM boot required) and Linux distributions, including cloud images like Canonical’s 300MB Ubuntu templates, and eliminates Curtin’s Ubuntu-specific constraints.

Better Control

Each step in the workflow (partitioning, image laydown, boot setup) is auditable. They can be paused at key moments so that installation development is easier and have the ability to re-run steps without redoing the entire process if changes are needed. Digital Rebar can run tasks before the first boot by initializing the agent early, which enables pre-boot customizations.

Simplified Configuration

There aren’t any mandatory prerequisites, such as the /curtin directory or making sure cloud-init is already installed. Some may find the hierarchical Eikon plans easier to validate and modify than Curtin’s flat configuration.

These aren’t just theoretical benefits. In testing, RackN engineers saw dramatically reduced deployment times for large images (like 200–300 GB Windows images) and far simpler debugging workflows than Curtin.

Real-World Use Cases

Eikon is beneficial in environments where:

• Fast, repeatable image deployments are preferred or necessary
• Golden images are preferred or a requirement
• Mixed OS deployments (Windows and Linux) are the norm
• Storage constraints on DRP endpoints make smaller images important

What’s Next?

We’re continuing to work on and improve Eikon. Currently, we’re prioritizing encrypted disk support and improved Windows compatibility. We’re basing Eikon’s development roadmap on real-world customer needs, rather than building features customers might use. Feedback and feature requests are welcome.

Try Eikon Today

Eikon is available now in Digital Rebar as a modern, natively supported alternative to Curtin. For documentation and deployment examples, visit our docs on Eikon or reach out to our team.