[Feature request] Ability to boot the machine without re-imaging.

[BSOD]

Posting this use case after some discussions in IRC, so you guys can decide whether it's something MAAS should cover or it's out of MAASs scope.

In short:
Sometimes people may want to acquire a set of nodes and just boot them into whatever is there on disk already. Right now MAAS will set netboot to True after releasing the node, so next time it's powered on it will be automatically re-imaged.
I've implemented some dirty solution locally that adds "Boot local" command, which is a power_on, but with netboot set to False. It works for me, but making it a part of MAAS would require a better solution, that won't break MAAS consistency. I'm just not sure whether MAAS should ever support something like this or not.

Use case:
Here's the problem I'm trying to solve with MAAS.
In our organization we have some number of dev hardware (~40 nodes) that people use for testing.
Right now assignment of nodes is managed somehow manually (in the team chat or doc) and it's a pretty messy process, no one knows exactly what is in use and for what. In addition, people often break the OS on the node and then it requires manual re-imaging. Right now we have ~3.7Gb large clonezilla image of ubuntu 12.04 + our stuff that we deploy manually every time something breaks.
With MAAS I'm trying to build some sort of self-service portal where people can pick any number of available nodes, assign to themselves and release when they're done with testing. This is something MAAS provides, however, they don't really want to re-image every node every time it changes hands. First, it takes quite a lot of time and second, sometimes they explicitly want to leave something on the node to be available for the next user (e.g. debug logs). In addition, after re-imaging, node is not ready for testing right away. Additional setup script has to be ran manually and it can't be a part of an image as it's hardware specific.
So, in this case, what would really help is some ability for node to change hands without changing the image. Simply changing the owner (without powering node off) seems to be not enough, because then you should explicitly say who's the next node owner and it's not a self-service anymore. So, node should go through release/acquire cycle.

I understand that this use case is not something that MAAS is meant for, but it covers 90% of it out of the box. So, maybe, if there're other people who'd like to use MAAS in the similar way, it's worth covering the rest 10%.

[Alberto Donato (ack)]

Thanks for your feature request, please could you start a thread over on our Discourse (https://discourse.maas.io/c/features) to discuss the feature?