The standard method for installing Debian is using debian-installer. However, there is considerable demand for ready Debian images for a large range of purposes. People want computers pre-installed with debian, live CD's for demos, cloud images for virtual machines, sd-card images for embedded boards. There is also growing interest in non-bootable images for containers. Debian main archive carries almost a dozen different tools for creating images - and outside debian there are dozens of others. All tools tend to use debootstrap as their, base, and add a bunch of common things on top - typically set up partition, filesystem, bootloader, default user and credentials, and possibly a custom kernel.
This talk explores the available methods and their use cases. I intend to look if there is room for consolidation in image creation tools, and how improve the quality and safety of prebuilt Debian images floating in the internet.