Debian Installer has offered preseeding from the start for hardware management; that is, you could pass in a number of presets to the installer in the form of a text file. Configuration settings that exist in the preseeding file are then not requested by the installer. If you answer all of the installer's questions by preseeding, Debian can be installed in a completely automated process. The free distribution is by no means the only one to support automation: Red Hat has Kickstart and Anaconda, and SUSE has AutoYaST2. Moreover, external projects like Fully Automatic Installation (FAI) can handle different distributions.

However, all these approaches are based on various assumptions about the existing infrastructure: One assumption is that the admin can find a way to start the setup routine of the respective system.

In the small, conventional environments of years past, this assumption was fine. Reinstalling hardware in the data center was not a recurring task. Once the admin was on site, they could quickly install systems one after another in an automatic process involving an appropriately prepared image.

Today, however, this approach no longer works. Today's massively scalable environments (e.g., to operate Kubernetes fleets) frequently need to be expanded – with dozens or hundreds of systems being added. In recent years, therefore, the principle of the bare metal life cycle and management to match have emerged. The idea is that as soon as a machine is unpacked and wired up in the rack, it can be installed