How to do it…
Debian offers a plethora of installation methods for the operating system. From standard CDs and DVDs, Debian also offers reduced-size installation media, bootable USB images, network boot, and other methods. The complexity of installation is a relative factor that usually is of no concern for DevOps since installation only happens once, while configuration and administration are continuously happening.
Before you start considering replication methods (such as precooked images, network distribution, configuration management, and software delivery), you and your team can choose from the following installation methods:
- If you are installing Debian on a third-party provider (such as a cloud vendor), they will either provide a Debian image for you, or you can prepare your own in virtualization software and upload the disk later.
- If you are installing on your own hardware (including virtualized environments), it's advisable to get either the netinst ISO or the full first DVD ISO. It all depends on whether you are installing several servers over the course of several months (thus making the DVD obsolete as new updates come out) or have a good Internet connection (or proxies and caching facilities, nearby CDNs, and so on) for downloading any additional packages that the netinst disk might not contain.
In general, if you are only deploying a handful of servers and have a good Internet connection at hand, I'd suggest you choose the amd64 netinst ISO, which we will use in this book.