The ultimate goal of this process is to have a server boot over the network and configure itself completely, rather than having to have someone interact with it. Although this is not a process controlled by Ansible, it is still a vital component in our Standard Operating Environment (SOE) architecture to ensure consistency of builds, and that build standards can be well documented and version controlled.
Fortunately, both CentOS (Red Hat-based) and Ubuntu (Debian-based) installers provide the capability for unattended installs to be completed in a programmatic manner. Sadly, there is no common standard for this process and, as you will see in this section, the language used for this process is wholly different between the two Linux types we are discussing here. Nevertheless, by covering off these two technologies, we are giving a good grounding that...