Fully Automatic Installation

Fully Automated Installation (FAI) is a group of shell and Perl scripts that install and configure a complete Linux distribution quickly on a large number of computers. It's the oldest automated deployment system for Debian.^[1]

Automation

FAI allows for installing Debian and Ubuntu distributions. But it also supports CentOS, Rocky Linux and SuSe Linux. In the past it supported Scientific Linux Cern.^[2] By default a network installation is done, but it's easy to create an installation ISO for booting from CD or USB stick. ^[3]

There's a web service for FAI which is called FAI.me, which allows creating customized installation images without setting up your own FAI server. ^[4] This service also creates cloud images and live images^[5]

This service supports Debian and Ubuntu. Debian's cloud team uses FAI for creating their official cloud images. ^[6]

Similar software exists for Red Hat (Kickstart), SuSE (AutoYaST, YaST and alice), Solaris (Jumpstart) and likely other operating systems.