Digital Rebar Provision vs FAI (Fully Automatic Installation)
Digital Rebar Provision
rackn.comFAI (Fully Automatic Installation)
fai-project.orgSide by side
| Figure | Digital Rebar Provision | FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · Bare Metal Provisioning Software | 8.7 (#4) | 8.0 (#9) |
| Founded | 2014 | 1999 |
| Integrations | The datasheet lists Terraform, Ansible AWX, VMware, Nutanix, Proxmox, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Git, GitLab, GitHub, ServiceNow, Remedy, Nagios, Prometheus, Chef and external vaults. | The maker documents receiving configuration over HTTP, NFS, SVN or Git, and adding SSH public keys from GitHub, GitLab, Debian Salsa or a custom URL in FAI.me. |
| Security | Security features include SAML and LDAP single sign-on, Active Directory integration, API-layer role-based access control, access logs, and Secure Boot workflows. | FAI packages are signed with Thomas Lange's GPG key, and the project lists Secure Boot support in FAI release 6.5.7. |
| Support | Every paid edition includes 8×5 support, while 24×7 premium support with architecture reviews is an upgrade. | The project directs questions to its mailing list and bugs to the Debian Bug Tracking System, and says commercial support is available worldwide from the author. |
Plans
Digital Rebar Provision
- Digital Rebar EnterprisePrice not published
- Digital Rebar PlatformPrice not published
In their own words
Digital Rebar Provision
Digital Rebar Provision has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation)
FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) automates unattended deployment and configuration of Linux systems and software on physical computers and virtual machines. It is free software under GNU GPL version 2 or later and can scale from a few computers to several thousand. The project lists Debian, Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Linux Mint, RHEL, and SUSE among supported distributions. Installations can use PXE network boot or unattended CD media, retrieving configuration through HTTP, NFS, SVN, or Git. Classes group similar machines, while hooks customize installation stages. FAI can partition disks, create file systems, and configure software RAID or LVM. It automates virtual-machine installation and customized cloud images for OpenStack, KVM, Azure, EC2, and GCE. FAI.me builds custom installation or live media and bootable disk images without local FAI installation, with settings for SSH keys, repositories, packages, scripts, and first-boot actions. Targets include desktops, servers, notebooks, clusters, server farms, and Linux labs or classrooms. The default large CD image includes full Debian XFCE and GNOME packages but fetches many other distribution packages over the network.