Knowing the fundamentals of your Linux environment, as we discussed in the last section, is vital to working out your deployment methodology. Although there exist some similarities between the build processes themselves (especially between traditional hypervisors and cloud environments), knowing these differences enables you to make informed decisions about how to deploy Linux throughout your enterprise.

Once you have chosen the methodologies most appropriate to your environment, it's important to consider a few principles to ensure your process is streamlined and efficient (again, bywords of Enterprise Linux deployments). We will cover these here to proceed into the real in-depth, hands-on work in the remainder of this book. Let's get started by looking at the need for simplicity in our builds.