Comment by esseph

> Ubuntu just recently got a way to automate its installer (recently being during covid). I think you can do the same on RHEL too. But that's largely it on Linux right now. If you need to admin 10,000+ computers, Windows is still the king.

1. cloud-init support was in RHEL 7.2 which released November 19, 2015. A decade ago.

2. Checking on Ubuntu, it looks like it was supported in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS in April 2018.

3. For admining tens of thousands of servers, if you're in the RHEL ecosystem you use Satellite and it's ansible integration. That's also been going on for... about a decade. You don't need much integration though other than a host list of names and IPs.

There are a lot of people on this list handling tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of linux servers a day (probably a few in the millions).